


Walking the Wire

by variablestar



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Bartender!Bokuto, Criminal!Akaashi, M/M, Mentions of Violence, all I can really say is Sorry, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-03-19 11:47:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13703853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/variablestar/pseuds/variablestar
Summary: Akaashi Keiji abides by three rules in life:One: Never let anyone in on your secrets, because there are no honest souls.Two: Never rely on anyone else to watch your back, because there are no trustworthy souls.Three: Never waste time watching anyone else's back, because there are no honorable souls.Akaashi Keiji is a terrible, broken, tired soul.





	1. the jackknife flutter behind your ribs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Home is where they say the heart is](https://youtu.be/vTpZdfm7iuk)  
>  Mine's buried in the yard  
> Hell's a place they say is for sinners  
> I'll be the man in charge

**The Black Swan Theory refers to an event or occurrence that opposes what is typically expressed in a situation.**

 

**For instance, someone who has only ever seen white swans who then sees a black swan may suggest that it must be a different type of bird entirely, because swans are white.  Black swans don’t exist.**

 

 **Often used to describe surprising events that are later rationalized in hindsight.  Because of course, many birds come in different colors, why wouldn’t swans?  Of course, nothing is too big to fail, and in fact, the bigger they are, the more of their soul there is to fracture when they hit the ground.  Of course, worlds can fall just as dominoes do, and why would you — of all people,** **_you_ ** **— ever even be a little bit safe—**

 

**See for further reference: the sinking of the Titanic, the Black Death.**

 

* * *

 

 

Akaashi Keiji has heard stories about himself: he can shoot a rolling ¥100 coin from a distance of twelve meters; he has a yakuza boss under his thumb as the result of an incident that also gave him the scar on his neck; the bandages all hide battle wounds from gang wars, from heists, from miraculous escapes.

 

Akaashi prefers that version of himself.

 

That version has courage.

 

* * *

 

 

There is a reason Akaashi keeps to one side of the apartment.  It’s clean, it’s orderly, it’s quiet.  There’s no noticeable paint splatters on the walls, and he never has to watch where he’s stepping for fear of finding blood on the floor.  Or anywhere, for that matter.  Despite what Oikawa might say, it’s all organized.  It is the one thing in his life that’s really well and truly put-together.  So he doesn’t have to worry about unfavorable discoveries.

 

This is specifically why he avoids the other half.  It is the half that, when they moved in, Akaashi designated as belonging to Kenma, Oikawa, and Yamaguchi.  Whatever they get up to there is their own business, and Akaashi generally doesn’t leave room for himself to feel any sort of concern for it.  If that end is a mess, it’s a mess.  If they get paint on the walls and ash in the carpet, and if they want to bring in stray dogs on cold nights that tear up their furniture, so be it.  None of it is meant to be Akaashi’s problem.

 

And yet.

 

Akaashi pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs as he looks down.  “You cannot solve all your problems with murder.”

 

“Says who?” Kenma asks.  He’s far too nonchalant about this.  He’s sitting on the back of the couch, legs swinging, and it’s like he doesn’t even _realize—_

 

“Says the _dead body in our living room.”_

 

“Your use of _our_ seems to imply that it is also _yours_ , and from what I remember, you gave this side of the apartment to me, Oikawa, and Tadashi.”

 

“I am not arguing semantics with you over a corpse.”

 

“I’m not sure you know what _semantics_ means, either.”

 

“ _Kenma._ ”

 

Kenma heaves a sigh and tugs on Akaashi’s hand before he can flinch away, bringing it down to the face of the body below them.  “He’s still _breathing_.  It’s fine.”  Sure enough, Akaashi can feel the faintest of exhales hitting the back of his hand.  Kenma retreats and looks away.  “Besides,” he mutters, “he shot first.”

 

“And why did he shoot?” Akaashi asks, staring him down.

 

“Neko-chan was trying to steal from him.” Oikawa strides into the room and drops onto the back of the couch, all elegance and grace and gangly limbs, peering down at the man unconscious on the ground.  Kenma glowers at him, but doesn’t try to protest.  “I mean, we _all_ were, but he’s the one who got caught.”

 

“You got me caught,” Kenma argues.  “Keiji, he can’t be responsible for surveillance anymore.  He’s just as shit at that as he is at everything else.”

 

Oikawa pulls an offended look, and pushes Kenma backwards onto the couch.  Kenma just drags Oikawa down with him.  Always a battle with them, of hair pulling and elbows in ribs.  Akaashi’s not sure anymore where they get more cuts and bruises from: committing petty crimes against the wrong people, or each other.  It’s hard to remember, some days, that as much as they go at each other, they regularly take it upon themselves to keep each other alive.

 

It takes a minute, but Kenma gets up eventually, putting as much distance between him and Oikawa as he can manage.  “You need to do something about _him_ , too.”  He wrinkles his nose as he returns his attention to the body.  Of all of them, Kenma should be the least offended by sights like this by now.

 

“Why should I have to keep dealing with your messes?” Akaashi says.

 

“You’re supposed to? For better or worse, sickness and in health, and all that shit.”

 

“That’s for marriage, and murder isn’t included in that.”

 

“It’s not murder,” Kenma and Oikawa both say.

 

“You’re cleaning up your own bodies next time,” Akaashi mutters.

 

The worst part of all this is, he knows.  Akaashi knows that despite everything, their problems are always going to be his problems.  This is why he always gets Yamaguchi out of fights he can’t take on his own, why he always bails Oikawa out of jail.  He can give them all hell for it, can try for all it’s worth to make them feel at least some semblance of guilt over it all, but he will always pick up after them, will always try to mend their ruins.

 

So he does what he does best, and he cleans it up.  He doesn’t complain, and he doesn’t make a scene over it, because dramatics aren’t very much his thing.  Akaashi simply takes care of moving the body, collecting what pieces of the story he can from Yamaguchi, and erasing all evidence that any of them ever left the apartment to begin with.  He trusts Kenma’s already taken care of security footage, and that Oikawa has spoken to whoever needed to be spoken to.  At some point he’ll probably have to track down Terushima, but considering he is not one of Akaashi’s, making sure he’s clear isn’t much of a priority.

 

What he needs now is to get out of the apartment.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a bar three blocks away that Oikawa refuses to go to.  Something about the music, he’s said before.  Probably.  Akaashi was only half-listening.  Yamaguchi can’t bear the atmosphere, and Kenma generally keeps in at night, if he can help it.  And so this is always Akaashi’s best bet at getting some space for himself when he needs it.

 

Shinya No Fukurou is not a particularly large bar, but it’s typically a busier hour when Akaashi comes in.  The stools are all filled at the bar itself, but most of the tables are empty.  It always smells like stale beer, and there are stains on the wall comparable to the ones in Oikawa’s room, which Akaashi wishes he didn’t know where they came from, and it’s all-in-all an unsavory place, for unsavory people.  So Akaashi fits right in.

 

There’s a corner booth he always takes for himself, closest to the emergency exit that leads into the back alley, and furthest from the bar itself.  There are half-formed words carved into the table alongside the water stains of too many spilled drinks.  But it’s good.  It’s enough.  Eventually, the newest bartender will notice him sitting there and come over.

 

It used to be the manager.  She would spot Akaashi sitting by himself, and ask if he wanted anything.  She could be a complete pain, more than open to teasing Akaashi the more he came in, pestering him about insignificant things, but she didn’t ask questions.  When he had blood on his collar, or when his sleeves bunched up to show the bandages wrapped around his arms, she overlooked it all.  She would bring him his drink, and another halfway through the night, but whatever curiosities she had, she kept to herself.

 

The benefits, Akaashi supposes, of coming to a bar like this.

 

Now, it’s Bokuto.  He’s even louder and more vibrant than Shirofuku, spends more time talking to him than anyone else, but still has the same manner of ignoring all the obvious questions.  That, above all else, is what Akaashi cares about.  For all it’s worth, the service could be terrible, the bar could be loud and the patrons obnoxious.  But as long as no one’s asking questions he can’t give honest answers to, Akaashi will stay.

 

Even if it means that he leaves Oikawa and Kenma for peace, just to be met with a too-loud, “Hey hey, Akaashi!”  Which, it’s not like he minds that now, either.  It’s just a lot.  Bokuto is a lot.

 

Or, well, _eccentric_ is probably the best word for it.  Wild, messy hair and a grin that’s misplaced in this corner of the city.  There’s a scarred patch of skin on his hand that he attributes to years of working in a tiny kitchen with too much hot grease.  When Shirofuku first introduced him, when he initially started working at the bar, he’d given Akaashi an unfamiliar look, which disappeared instantly as he bounded into too much chatter to precede the question of if he could get him a drink.

 

(Shirofuku had come back alone at Akaashi’s next visit, insistent on knowing how he’d regularly been coming to the bar for over a year and Bokuto was the only one to ever get his name.)

 

(Akaashi has never told her that it’s because he was intimidated.)

 

* * *

 

 

Most nights, Bokuto talks.  Rambles.  About flowers, about planets and stars, about the kitchen fire Konoha started.  Akaashi listens, sips at a virgin cocktail, watches Shirofuku escort two fighting customers twice her size out of the bar.  He pretends he knows the faces to go with all the names he throws out.  Bokuto leans on the table, fingers tapping against the wood just as fast as the words coming from his mouth.  He has three fingernails painted in gold, the rest having chipped away.

 

“It’s like, the blood of the universe, you know?  Keeping it alive,” he says.  “Like, everything’s built off stardust.  It’s always flowing and creating and it makes us alive and keeps us alive, which is crazy when you think about it.  Because, I mean, stars are so far, you know?  And most of ‘em are dead when we see ‘em.  But they’re still responsible for us being here.”

 

Akaashi doesn’t mind it when Bokuto wants to talk, because his words never beg a response.  Just someone to listen, which is something Akaashi can manage.  And it’s better than when Oikawa has something to say, or when Kenma comes into his room late in the night, because they always have something heavy on their minds.  They had a nightmare, Akaashi, and they can’t sleep because they keep hearing the gunshots, and _can I just sit in here a little while?  Until it’s quiet again?_  Or, hey, death isn’t scary, not really, _I’m not scared to die_ , but drowning is.  Drowning is terrifying and _please, Keiji, please don’t let me drown let me burn before I drown_.

 

Bokuto only ever wants to talk about living things.

 

Akaashi sometimes forgets about those.

 

So he sits and drinks and lets him ramble on.

 

“Konoha tells me it’s stupid, but, I mean, he once went on an hour-long rant about ladybugs that I still don’t get.  You know when they’re threatened, they bleed from their knees?”

 

“That’s very interesting, Bokuto-san.”

 

“They’re so weird.   _Gross_ , too.  But, anyway, Konoha can’t call the stars thing weird when he’s, like, totally obsessive over beetles.  You think ladybugs can see stars?  Or do they have no idea?  They probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where they came from, huh?”

 

“They’re too concerned with the knee blood,” Akaashi says.  The look Bokuto gives him is the same one he gets when he talks about peonies.

 

Eventually, someone pulls Bokuto back to the bar.  He returns, later, with another drink, and tells him about broken glasses behind the counter and spilled whiskey.  Akaashi nods along and wonders if Bokuto knows his thumb is bleeding.  He’ll figure it out, eventually.  But by then Akaashi is gone, walking a five-block loop back to the apartment — his method to not get tailed.  Because he can never be too careful in a city that bites for him to bleed.  Not when there are other people who try to follow him home with thoughts of vengeance for things Akaashi feels no remorse over.

 

(Remorse means regret.  And neither is affordable here.)

 

There’s a dog curled up on the couch when Akaashi comes in, with stringy white fur and a scrunched up face.  Kenma is sitting on the floor in front of it, scratching behind its ears.  Yamaguchi is perched on the armrest brushing its fur.  Akaashi, as he has learned to do with most things, does not ask.  He just tells them not to let it piss on the carpet, because he’s not cleaning that up.

 

“How dare you,” Kenma replies, protectively cradling the dog’s head against his chest.  “Ama would never.”

 

“That’s what you said about the last three strays you brought in,” Akaashi says, “and that includes Terushima.  Keep it clean or keep it in your room.”

 

“This is our room,” Yamaguchi says.  “Our half of the apartment.”

 

Akaashi wonders, briefly, when he really started talking back.  Why the _hell_ he ever taught him to.

 

“I’m paying the rent,” he says instead.  But he lets it go, because there’s no point in trying to win an argument with either of them.  “At least keep him off the couch.  You’re going to ruin it.”

 

“It’s already ruined,” Kenma tells him, “by your resident arsonist.”

 

“It has to be intentional to be arson!” Oikawa calls from his room.

 

“Like I said: resident arsonist.”

 

A shoe comes flying out of Oikawa’s room.  It misses them all by a long shot.

 

When he eventually goes to his own room to sleep, closer to dawn than dusk, Akaashi thinks about the ash forever ground into the carpet, and the blood marking the walls.  He wonders what he has to do to to keep it there.  What he has to do to keep his boys and all their chaos safe in a world designed to keep hopeful wings clipped.  There are stars burning outside his window that he can’t see, that are long since dead several light years away.

 

If stardust created all the high hopes in the world, it also created the fire to burn them.

  



	2. not so good at being (alive)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Now please tell me I'm broke](https://youtu.be/IGOBQfUAhB4)  
>  It's much easier that way,  
> 'Cause I just let you down  
> It's much easier that way

“Hey hey Akaashi!  You look really nice tonight!”  Bokuto bounds over to Akaashi’s booth, wide grin across his face.  “Heading somewhere special?” His hands come down soft on the table, and he leans in with a conspiratorial glint in his eye.  “Hot date?”

 

Akaashi wonders what it must be like, to live in a world capable of thinking easy.  Breathing easy.  Sleeping easy without knives underneath pillows.  He wonders what it must be to be made of stardust, of the blood of the universe, and not rot and ruin.  He tells Bokuto, “It’s for business.”

 

And the expression on his face falters, because the meaning of that is limited when spoken in a bar like this, a city like this, but he doesn’t comment on it.  Bokuto only nods and asks Akaashi if he’d like a drink, and is he sure he doesn’t want any alcohol, really, _this is a bar, you know, it’s kind of our specialty— well, not mine, but everyone else’s._

 

He leaves Akaashi alone for the few minutes it takes to make an over-sweetened drink, and the ten he spends in conversation with the short bartender whose laugh carries across the whole room.  Akaashi picks apart a stray napkin, the pieces littering across the table like snow and ash.

 

When Bokuto comes back, he slides Akaashi’s drink across the table, and stuffs his hands in his apron pockets.  Akaashi wonders if he ever gives the other customers the same attention, or if he wastes all his time on Akaashi.

 

“Hey ‘Kaashi, do you know anything about cats?” Bokuto asks.

 

Akaashi pulls at his fingers, thinks about Kenma and the two strays that were in the kitchen that morning.  “Some,” he tells Bokuto.

 

“Because, like, you know, I have this cat,” Bokuto says, “that the shelter — you know, you know, the one over by that accounting office that’s totally laundering money? That one.  It was going to put this cat down, because he’s missing a foot, and I’m pretty sure he’s kind of deaf?  Me ’n’ Konoha went by last week, and now he lives with me, and, see, the thing is, Akaash’, is this cat is, like, _really_ bad at being a cat.  I don’t think he’s ever seen another cat in his life.  He never sleeps?  He only ever wants to play, all the time, which, that’s okay, because I’ve kinda got insomnia, so not like I sleep either, but _gods_ .  He’s the _worst_ at being a cat, Akaashi.”

 

“Are you sure he’s a cat?” Akaashi asks.  He rests his chin in his hand, knows Bokuto is going to stick around a while.

 

“ _Positive_.  Hey, can cats have broccoli?  Like, is that okay for them or will Cumin get sick?”

 

“ _Cumin_ ,” Akaashi echoes.  Kenma and Yamaguchi have given strays their fair share of odd names, and this fits right in with it.

 

“Yeah!  Cumin!  Because he’s kinda the same color.  I think.  Oh no, what color is cumin, ‘Kaashi?  It’s, like, brown right?  Ugly brown?”

 

There’s something about Bokuto’s word choice that reminds Akaashi of something easier.  Something like the afternoons he spends wedged between Kenma and Oikawa on the couch while they argue about who’s actually cheating at Go Fish, and the nights Yamaguchi rushes into his room to come look at a painting, come _look, Akaashi, I got the colors right this time_.

 

“Ugly brown,” Akaashi confirms.  “And steamed broccoli is okay.”

 

“ _Steamed_ broccoli.  How come steamed?  How come not, like, fresh broccoli?  Is there something super wrong with it?” Words tumble out, and Bokuto doesn’t stop himself.  He used to.  Used to cut himself short and apologize because _wow, hey, that was too much at once, huh?_  Akaashi, in one of his less smooth moments, had told him to shut up, that he didn’t care if Bokuto spoke for two hours with no stopping points, so quit apologizing for it.

 

(He tried to put it more nicely, a couple days after, to which Bokuto had laughed and told Akaashi he didn’t care.  It was fine if he was rude, he knew he didn’t mean it.  So Akaashi stopped apologizing, too.)

 

“I don’t know, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi tells him.  “That’s just what Yamaguchi read.”

 

“Oh, oh, who’s that!  Akaashi, you have friends?” Bokuto seems to realize how that might sound in the instant he says it, because he laughs straight away, loud and sharp and sudden, and holds his hands up in front of him.  “Not like— I mean, of course you do, you just never talk about them!”

 

Akaashi feels a smile pulling at him.   _Friends_ probably isn’t the right word, isn’t all-encompassing enough.  But he’s not going to explain to Bokuto, now, how he saved Kenma from a back alley, or how Yamaguchi fits into his life.  So it’s good enough.

 

“You haven’t asked,” Akaashi says.

 

“Akaashi!” Bokuto pouts.  “You’ve gotta tell me!”

 

“Mm, I suppose.”  Akaashi sips at his drink, and Bokuto bounces on his toes with anticipation.  “Yamaguchi’s an artist,” he says after a moment.  “A very talented one.  He gets paint everywhere and cheats at board games.”  Bokuto’s trying and failing to hold a grin back.  Akaashi wonders, briefly, what about this is so special.  Why Bokuto always seems thrilled whenever Akaashi allows himself to give up pieces of his life.  There is nothing so spectacular about such a ruined soul.  “He and Kenma bring in strays all the time, so they always look up if what we’ve got is okay for them to eat.”

 

“Really!  ‘Kaashi, ‘Kaashi, who’s Kenma?  They live with you?  How come you never told me!”

 

Bokuto, Akaashi thinks, tells him endless stories about his life, and Akaashi rarely shares any of his own.  But it’s a scary thought, what that would mean, so Akaashi doesn’t think much on it.  If Bokuto wants to ask, Akaashi will tell, but he won’t go out of his way.  He can’t let himself.  He worries too much that he’s contagious.  That Bokuto will fracture, too.

 

“They both live with me,” Akaashi says.  “Them and Oikawa.  Like family.”

 

Bokuto is _glowing_.  Akaashi lets himself talking.

 

* * *

 

Akaashi does have business to take care of.  It’s not pleasant, by any means.  His bones are heavy as he exists Shinya no Fukurou late in the night.  He’s got Bokuto’s laugh ringing in his head, but the street is dark with lurking devils.

 

He ignores the feeling as he crosses the city, focusing instead on the fact that he’s doing this for his boys.  He’s doing this to keep them from being hunted down by a group they fucked with for kicks, just because they were _bored_ , just to see if they could really break in that easily.

 

He’s doing it to keep his boys from ever finding out that there were, in fact, consequences for that, and to let them continue living thinking no one ever knew.

 

(They knew.  They always do.  Akaashi does what it takes to make them forget.)

 

Everything about it is unpleasant.  Shirabu is an asshole, Tendou insufferable.  Kawanishi makes ruthless remarks that remind Akaashi that this is where he really comes from.  That no matter how hard he tries, he will always be of the gutter.  He can refuse the gun and try to keep the body count at zero, but there are still gnarled scars marring his torso that he earned after exposing a mob boss who’d put his trust in Akaashi — who’d done _so much_ to help him — just to get himself off the hook for his own conviction.  He still has the marks to show he is always going to be his father’s son.  He will always come from the rubble and ruins.

 

* * *

 

Kenma is leaning over the back of the couch with his DS when Akaashi gets back to the apartment.  He’s entirely unbalanced, with the way that he’s using one foot to try and fight against Oikawa getting any closer, and it’s only a matter of time before he falls.

 

“Keiji, make him stop,” Kenma says without looking up.  “He’s trying to fuck me over, and I wanna beat the level.”

 

“He said I could try it!” Oikawa argues, stretching for the DS.  “That was three hours ago, and _gods_ Kenma, your feet _reek_ , _stop._ ”

 

“They smell like _roses_ ,” Kenma replies, sticking his foot directly in Oikawa’s face.  Oikawa yelps and recoils so hard he falls directly onto the floor, a horrified expression on his face.

 

“ _Heathen_.”  Oikawa glares, grabs Kenma by the ankle, and _pulls_.

 

Akaashi starts down the hall to his room before he can get involved, ignoring the shouts of his name and Kenma cursing out Oikawa.  His ribs ache, and he feels a rotting in his bones, but it’s worth it for them all to sleep with the lights off.  He’ll fight and break and bleed a thousand times over if it means they’ll all sleep with the damn lights off.

 

“Asshole!  Asshole, you’re going to _break it—_ ”

 

“ _That was my nose!”_

 

“ _Was._ ”

 

He locks his bedroom door, tosses his coat onto the desk chair, and gingerly begins to unbutton his shirt.

 

“Yama-chan!  Help pin him down!”

 

 _“I will end you_.  Tadashi!”

 

 _Family_.  It’s probably not the right word either, but it’s closer.  It’s closer, because Akaashi’s bruising, and he gave up pieces about all of them to Bokuto while he sat in the bar.  There’s a cat lying underneath Akaashi’s bed that he doesn’t recognize.  He winces as he crouches to pet it.

 

“Kenma, that _hurts_.”

 

“You started this!  You fucking— Hey!”

 

“Let go, I’m not part of this. _I just came in for chips.”_

 

Akaashi lifts a clean shirt over his head, hides the skin that’s already turning sickly and dark.

 

A mottled constellation.

 

(When news breaks the next morning of an overnight bank heist, Akaashi pretends to be surprised, and pretends not to feel the ache in his sides.  Pretends not to hear Kawanishi’s voice in his ear, murmuring _coward_.)


	3. oh, so hopelessly out of tune

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Well, what kind of man, kind of man are you?](https://youtu.be/iqojQJGt-Vo)  
>  Showing love like you do, like you do

“Aka-chan, thank the _gods_ you’re home.  There’s blood _everywhere_ , it’s a _mess_.”

 

Akaashi is barely in the door when Oikawa’s on him.  Everything about the way he drapes himself over Akaashi’s shoulders is casual, but he can see the cracks in the carefully crafted pout, can see the blood staining his shirt and hands.  The panic comes through in how quickly he pulls Akaashi down the hall to Yamaguchi’s room.  The mess is decidedly the least of his worries.

 

Yamaguchi’s in the oversized chair, with Kenma beside him on the armrest.  They’re both pressing towels to their skin, and there’s blood streaked and puddled on the floor.  Yamaguchi’s got tear tracks down his face but the crying’s been reduced to just sniffling now.  There’s the stuttering thought somewhere in the back of Akaashi’s mind that it’s been a long time since it was _their_ blood leaving the stains.

 

But there is no room for those thoughts here.  So he sets to work.

 

* * *

 

Akaashi abides by three rules in life:

 

One: never let anyone in on your secrets, because there are no honest souls.

 

Two: Never rely on anyone else to watch your back, because there are no trustworthy souls.

 

Three: Never waste time watching anyone else’s back, because there are no honorable souls.

 

* * *

 

He has broken all of these rules exactly three times.

 

* * *

 

There’s a gash in Kenma’s shoulder that Akaashi winces at.  As much as Kenma tries to look like it doesn’t, Akaashi knows it hurts.  He’s going to have to clean it, and bandage it, and hope to false gods that it’s not deep enough to be serious.

 

While he finds clean towels, Oikawa looks into the freezer for anything to hold against the bruises lining Kenma’s throat.  Yamaguchi keeps his eyes trained away from all of it, but Kenma’s holding his hand with a white-knuckled grip.

 

* * *

 

Kenma was the first.

 

Akaashi came across him in a back alley downtown, shivering and alone, a feral look in his eye when he noticed Akaashi beside him.  He had half an ear missing, his shirt was torn to shreds, and his _hands_ —

 

His hands still hold the reminders of split skin.

 

Eventually he worked it out that Kenma hadn’t eaten in three days, that the food he’d managed to scrounge up had gone to a bony stray cat.

 

Empathy wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling.  It wasn’t like Akaashi lacked the ability for it, it was that he preferred to ignore it.  Saving his own skin was a priority.  But it struck him to see a lost, lonely boy covered in dirt and scars, rotting away in a city that hated him, a city that hated all of them.

 

Akaashi brought him home.  It was not an easy process — he still has the scars from Kenma’s initial lashing out — but he got him into the shower (not a bath, he refused a bath, would always stay away from any water deeper than a puddle), into clothes that weren’t so threadbare and full of holes.  He got Kenma to eat.  Convinced him to sleep in Akaashi’s tiny apartment, just for the night.

 

He was gone in the morning.

 

And back again three days later.

 

“I lost my friend,” he told Akaashi, “and I don’t know how to be alone.”

 

He kept his distance initially.  He would be in the same room as Akaashi, but on the complete opposite end of it.  He was skittish, easily spooked.  He would hide in the spare bedroom if Akaashi tried to pry too much.

 

But he never stayed alone.  Kenma followed Akaashi everywhere at first.  He would tail him around the city, into grocery stores and laundromats.  If Akaashi went into the bar, Kenma would be waiting outside when he was ready to leave.

 

He rarely spoke.  He didn’t leave the apartment unless Akaashi did first.  Sometimes he would wander away while they were out, but he would always come back by the time Akaashi noticed.

 

Akaashi stopped asking questions, and Kenma slowly thawed.  It was a process, but it all came together eventually when Akaashi was working on a puzzle at three in the morning, and Kenma joined him at the table to help.  That only lasted a short while, before Kenma started batting pieces off the table out of frustration.  “Puzzles stress me out,” he said.  He didn’t help pick up any of the pieces, but Akaashi woke up two days later to the entire rest of the puzzle put together.

 

It was a start.

 

With time, Kenma pieced himself into Akaashi’s life.  He still didn’t speak as much, and Akaashi sometimes had to let Kenma lead him in order to figure out what he wanted.  He had to regularly pause in the grocery store to determine that Kenma was frustrated because he’d wanted apples and they’d walked right by them.  He spent nearly an hour one night rearranging throw pillows until Kenma finally settled down.  He was a series of patient discoveries.

 

They grew into it all together.  Kenma became comfortable, gradually making more and more taunting comments while Akaashi was working, and eventually, growing into the point of full-on climbing into his lap when he wanted attention.

 

He turned into a pest, at some point.  Akaashi wouldn’t take it any other way.

 

With time, he learned about Terushima.  The introduction came at two in the morning, with him and Kenma coming into the apartment stained in ash.  (It’s one of the few times he’s ever heard Kenma laugh.  Like a star exploding.)  Akaashi’s still not sure where Terushima fits into Kenma’s life, exactly, just that Kenma will always default to him.

 

Kenma started sleeping without the lights on.  Akaashi began to untangle the night.

 

* * *

 

Kenma hisses at the antibiotic ointment as it goes over his skin.  The hand he has on Oikawa’s shoulder tightens so much the knuckles go white, and Akaashi wonders how he can find _this_ worse than being stabbed.  But then, he also understands that sometimes, the recovery is more painful than the break.

 

“This is literally the easiest part,” Akaashi says.

 

“How about I stab _you_ and see how you like it,” Kenma bites back.

 

Akaashi does not respond with telling him that he’s been through it enough that the feeling is muscle memory at this point, or that Kenma _has_ stabbed him before and doesn’t need to do it again.  He does not look to the bandages wound around his arms.  He does not think of a death without dying, because he is too busy trying to mend his boys before they ever have to experience it for themselves.

 

“You’re such a baby,” Akaashi tells him.

 

Kenma glares.  “Suck my ass, Kei— Ow, _stop_ .  You fucking _sadist_.”

 

Yamaguchi has been silent the entire time, biting his lip as he presses the towel harder against his side.  When it’s finally his turn, Akaashi tries and fails not to flinch at the wound he reveals.

 

“That’s going to need stitches,” he says.

 

Behind him, Oikawa gags.  As if this is the worst thing he’s ever had to witness.

 

* * *

 

Oikawa was the second.  And he was never not a nuisance.

 

He was always louder than Kenma in everything he did.  That included the explosion that brought him into Akaashi’s life to begin with.  An accident, he still insists, and Akaashi is never sure if he means the explosion itself, or just that he blew up the wrong car.  Regardless, the shrapnel nearly impaled Akaashi, and sent Kenma darting away to be lost for a good couple of hours.

 

He apologized.  A rush of words and a blur of hand gestures, and he swore that it wasn’t supposed to go off then, see, he set the charges a little early, his calculations were off, math is bullshit anyway—

 

There were scorch marks across his shirt and ash in his hair, and he grinned like the world’s collapse.  He was lanky, all skin and bones, his clothes too baggy and sleeves too short.  He startled easy but subtly.  Akaashi could see the little star-mark scars on his neck, his hands, and told him to shut up already, he wasn’t dead, was he?  So who cared.

 

Oikawa had a skeleton laugh.

 

Akaashi brought him home, even though there wasn’t really space for him.  Kenma holed up in the room he’d finally taken as his own, and didn’t come out for the rest of the night.  Oikawa sprawled across the couch and let Akaashi cook for him.  He answered the few questions Akaashi asked, but it was impossible to tell if he was being honest or not.

 

He couldn’t get rid of Oikawa after that.  He showed up at Akaashi’s door on a regular basis, sometimes just to bother him, sometimes in search of a meal, sometimes needing help, help, please, it hurts, _I didn’t think I’d catch flame, too._

 

(Oikawa was and always has been a constant reminder that even the gods could burn.)

 

He had no reservations about draping himself all over Akaashi while offering his mindless musings, or teasing him for every little thing.  He forced himself into every part of Akaashi’s life, regardless as to what Akaashi had to say about it.

 

But of course there were cracks in the glass.  There were the middle-of-the-night breakdowns, the panicked shouts for people Akaashi would never meet, the grasping for air as he struggled awake from a troubled sleep.  Oikawa could smile and laugh all he wanted, but Akaashi had seen the look in his eye the first time Kenma returned to the apartment bleeding, and the desperation in his voice as he yelled for Akaashi to come help.  It wasn’t much more than a scrape.

 

There were days Akaashi came home to find Oikawa had picked the lock, again, the third time in a week, and _no, I don’t want a key, that takes all the fun out of it, do I look like I give a shit if it damages the door?_  There were days he found him stretched across his bed, flipping through a book he had no interest in actually reading, days he found him and Kenma curled up on the couch together, arguing over which bad alien movie to watch.

 

Akaashi started looking for a bigger apartment.  The night unraveled.

 

* * *

 

He has to give Oikawa credit for sticking around the whole time, even as he goes pale at the sight of the needle.  It’s not even coming close to his skin, yet he’s short of breath.

 

Yamaguchi flinches as Akaashi starts to stitch him back together.  Akaashi wants to tell him off for not saying anything about how bad it was, because he would’ve started with him and not Kenma.  But he won’t speak a word, because this isn’t Yamaguchi’s territory.  Everything is always unfamiliar ground, and Akaashi won’t get anywhere by scolding him where he didn’t know any better.

 

So he cleans him up, and gets the story from Kenma.  That they were walking home from the corner store, and they were jumped, and no, they didn’t see their face, just a patch of tattooed skin on their forearm — dahlias, maybe.  They were lucky Oikawa was waiting up for them.  Because if he hadn’t come, they wouldn’t have returned.

 

It’s as Akaashi is mopping up the floor that Yamaguchi goes through and turns on every light in the apartment.

 

* * *

 

Yamaguchi was the third.  He still stands as Akaashi’s only mistake.

 

* * *

 

Shinya No Fukurou is a den for skeletons who carry knives next to the stolen souls in their pockets.

 

Akaashi’s seen Shirofuku with a gun tucked in the back of her waistband, and there’s an angry-looking cook who sometimes emerges from the kitchen to throw the rowdier customers out.  There are distinct bullet holes in the back wall.  It’s far from safe, but it’s convenient that way.  When the whole of the environment is a fault line in itself, Akaashi doesn’t feel so wrong to bring in his own fractures.

 

It’s a place that means no questions when he comes in on nights where there’s blood staining his shirtsleeves and a weight in his bones.  (Kenma always tells him to be honest about it anyway, because “if you tell them you were out burying a body, they’ll think it’s some kind of fucked up joke.”  But Akaashi’s never been on good terms with the truth to begin with.)  It’s a different sense of safety to be able to sit in his booth and for Bokuto to speak nothing specific of his appearance when he comes over to greet him, for him to overlook the dark circles stamped under his eyes and the shirt he’s clearly neglected to change out of for the last several days.

 

There’s a look, of course, because there always is with Bokuto.  He’s openly expressive, and Akaashi doesn’t quite get how he can carry himself like that.

 

“Can I get you something to drink, ‘Kaashi?”

 

“No alcohol, please.”

 

The look shifts into something different, but equally terrible.  “You sure?”

 

Akaashi gives him a look of his own, and Bokuto scurries back to the bar.

 

It’s late.  Akaashi wants to know how to ruin whoever laid a finger on his boys.  He wants to sleep and he wants them to sleep again.  Akaashi _wants_.

 

But he will accomplish nothing if he returns to the apartment now.  He’s spent the last three days in the apartment, with Kenma and Yamaguchi to either side of him on the couch, watching movies he can’t follow because he’s too distracted with the concern over how badly Oikawa’s hands shake.  He needs space, to think.  To try to lift the heavy feeling from his bones.

 

He needs something so terribly alive that it’s cruel.

 

Bokuto comes back with something bright and blue, and sets it in front of Akaashi.  “You think there’s ever been two people born at the exact same time?” he asks.  “Like, they both suddenly became two human beings at the same instant.  There’s been billions of people in the world, Akaashi, it has to have happened sometime, right?”

 

If two people could die in the same instant, surely they could be born in the same one, too.  Akaashi sips at his drink.  It’s full of sugar.

 

“How do you even decide when someone’s actually _born_ , anyway?  First breath of air?  When you start crying?  I bet Komi would know, he was in med school before he had to drop out.”

 

Bokuto has painted his nails green.  They tap against his thigh as he looks just past Akaashi, head cocked to the side, thinking.  There is a spark, somewhere deep within Akaashi.

 

“Hey, Akaash’, what are you, before you’re alive?  You’re not dead, because that comes after.  Is there a word for before?”

 

Somewhere across the city, a man is dying.

 

“You’re dust,” Akaashi says.  “Stardust.”

 

Golden eyes light up.

 

Akaashi is burning.


	4. an ache in your bones that you can't ignore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [if it all falls apart,](https://youtu.be/eeu2Y3mdSkU)  
>  if this thing goes wrong,  
> oh, put me back together  
> however you want.  
> my mind plays tricks  
> and i don't sleep no more

When last call comes at three in the morning, Akaashi is still in the booth.  He’s finished both his drinks, and has been staring at the skewed painting on the back wall for half an hour, trying to decipher what it’s even supposed to _be._

 

Bokuto finds him.

 

“Hey, Akaashi, you know we’re closing, right?” He leans against the table, looking like it doesn’t really make a difference whether Akaashi actually goes or not.  “You alright?”  His apron is off, a patchwork jacket taking its place.

 

“Bokuto-san,” he says, “what is your favorite color?”

 

Bokuto pauses for a moment as he studies Akaashi.  When he tilts his head to the side, one eye kind of half-closes, and Akaashi can’t really tell if it’s intentional or not.  It is, regardless, very _Bokuto_.  Uneven, in the right kind of way.

 

“Can we take a walk?” Bokuto asks.

 

Akaashi figures he has little to lose, and follows him out.

 

It’s an empty street in the middle of the night.  Neon signs still hum with light down the block, and the occasional car passes by, but it’s all quiet.  A pause in the constant motion of a busy city thrumming with life and all the devils.  Bokuto walks along the curb, a balancing act.

 

It’s only after they’ve walked half a block that Bokuto speaks.  “Have you ever been, like, out in the middle of the ocean?  So far you can hardly see the shore behind you, and there’s nothing in front of you.  Except maybe, like, another boat.  Sometimes birds.  Konoha swears he saw a shark once, but considering he’s totally a compulsive liar, I don’t know if I believe him.  Seriously, ‘Kaashi, he lies about what brand of dish soap we use.  But you know.  Way out there.  Have you ever been?”

 

Akaashi shakes his head.  He will not tread where he cannot touch his feet to the ground, where he lacks control.

 

“Well, I mean, I guess it’d look the same from the beach.  Or from, like, a really high building,” Bokuto continues.  “When you have enough distance that you can totally clearly see the horizon, everything kind of starts to, like, bleed together.  The ocean and the sky shift into each other, but if you really look, you can see the— the little _seam_ between all the blue.  It’s like, tinted white.  That’s my favorite.”  Bokuto hops over a sewer grate and looks over at Akaashi.  “Or gold.  It’s really pretty.  Sparkles.  Hey, did you know sunflowers always face towards the sun?”

 

Neon blue lights the side of Bokuto’s face in shadow, and it’s an image Akaashi can’t push out of his mind even as they’re moving on to the next block and it’s traded for the foggy pale haze of the street lamps.

 

“I think only some sunflowers do that, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi tells him.

 

“Well, still!  Some of them do!” Bokuto huffs.  He swings around a lamp post and pauses to look at Akaashi.  “They can sense where the sun is.  Plants!  I mean, it’s like, a thing with light and heat, I think, but they still feel it!  Which is crazy, because, you know, they’re living things, but not like I think we usually think about living things.  So do you think they can sense other things, too?  Can they feel that they’re alive?”

 

“I think it would be terrible for them if they did,” Akaashi says.  He can’t imagine something so alive feeling the gunpowder ache of existing.

 

“Maybe,” Bokuto hums.

 

Bokuto, when he talks, says exactly what he’s thinking, in the exact manner that he thinks it.  Sometimes things come out jumbled.  Usually, Akaashi can’t find the connection between two back-to-back thoughts, but imagines the jump is sensible to Bokuto.  He doesn’t mind it.  

 

“Hey, Akaashi, if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” Bokuto asks after they’ve walked another block.

 

Akaashi watches him kick a pebble down the street, watches how his eyes glow gold in the dim light.  He thinks he wouldn’t want to go anywhere, wouldn’t want to be away from this moment’s pause from the maelstrom.  But then he thinks about Yamaguchi, who rarely sleeps because his mind is full of nightmares he doesn’t deserve; of Kenma, who sometimes gets stuck on a loop of telling Akaashi it’s possible to drown in two inches of water and _do you know about the Doña Paz?_ ; Oikawa, who flinches when the neighbors start yelling.  He thinks of a scared soul shoved away in the back of a closet, taped off and locked up and forgotten about for fear of it ever coming back out.

 

 _Pause_ implies an eventual continuation.  The storm will always be waiting at the ready.

 

He says, “As far away from here as I can get.”

 

* * *

 

Kenma and Yamaguchi are asleep in Akaashi’s bed when he gets home.  Akaashi remains wide awake and restless for the rest of the night.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Akaashi forgets to be afraid for his boys.  There are some mornings where he comes into the kitchen to find Oikawa burning eggs on the stove, and Kenma cross-legged on the table trying to toss marshmallows into Yamaguchi’s mouth.  Days where they’re loud and don’t smell of smoke, and play Mario Kart way too loud while Akaashi is trying to pay bills.  The days where Akaashi doesn’t pocket money from the favors he does to keep them from being targeted, and to get the charges against them all dropped, he forgets to worry.

 

But then there are the mornings where he’s startled awake by Kenma pulling his hair out in a panic attack, and where Oikawa’s hands won’t stop trembling as he tries to dial Terushima’s number, and Yamaguchi is still hiding under the covers hours after it’s all over.  There are days Akaashi avoids all the mirrors, because he can’t handle seeing the bandages that hide the scars warping his skin that have reflected onto his boys.

 

Those are the times Akaashi remembers.  And he is terrified.

 

Because he has stood exactly in their place, and it is a hole he barely managed to scrape himself out of.  He cannot imagine them surviving through the same wounds, the same scars, the same screaming at three in the morning with a lighter held against skin even though they’re sorry, _sorry, I didn’t know not to tell, I promise, please stop_ , the same bone-deep ache.  This is his fault.

 

“ _Aka-kuuuuun._ ”

 

Terushima is leaning into the kitchen doorway.  There’s something lacking in the way he holds himself, and while he is not one of Akaashi’s, it still leaves him feeling hung down with worry.

 

“If, say, there was a broken light bulb in Kenma’s room, how would you go about taking care of that?  Not that there is or anything, just, you know.  There is.”

 

Akaashi pushes back from the table and sighs.  Terushima is, when it comes down to it, a necessity when it comes to Kenma.  In whatever way their lives fit together, he is the only one who is capable of keeping Kenma safe, both from the monsters and from himself.  But Terushima is also a complete hazard, and the instant he’s solved whatever problem, he becomes one.

 

There are times Akaashi wonders what path he branched from, to end up such a haphazard mess still so sure of his place in the world, while the rest of them are afraid of their own shadows in the moonlight.

 

There are times Akaashi wonders if Terushima knows what dying feels like.

 

“Did you at least clean up the glass?” he asks.

 

 _“Did I clean up the glass_ ,” Terushima scoffs.  “Do you think I’m stupid, Aka-kun?  I’ll have you know I was top of my class before I dropped out.  Perfect marks.  I was a fucking _prodigy_.  A _savant_.  Only an idiot wouldn’t clean up the glass first thing, because that’s obviously the perfectly sensible thing to do, and so naturally, I did it.  Immediately.  It was the very first thought I had the moment it shattered.”

 

Akaashi levels him with a look, and there’s a pause, a crack where the corners of Terushima’s mouth twitch up.

 

“On an entirely unrelated note, you should keep your broom somewhere easier to find, like the hall closet, where it makes _sense_ , and not . . . not, uh—”

 

“The bathroom closet,” Akaashi deadpans.

 

 _“Exactly,”_ Terushima says.  “The _bathroom closet._  Stupid, Aka-kun.  How’s anyone supposed to find it there?  Lucky I’m smart enough to have figured it out.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have matters to attend to.”

 

Akaashi would bet Terushima has only witnessed death.  He hopes he never has to survive it.

 

There are, of course, no other light bulbs to replace the broken one with, which means Akaashi’s required to go out to get more, since he’s not about to trust Terushima with the task.  So he brings Yamaguchi, because at the very least, it’ll help clear his head to get him out for a little while.  Holing up in his room isn’t going to help anything.

 

It’s three and a half blocks to the nearest general store, just past Shinya no Fukurou, so they walk five and loop around.  Yamaguchi looks in the windows of all the shops they pass, and averts his gaze when they go by office buildings.  Akaashi hopes to the heavens that there’s not much more damage Terushima can do while they’re gone.  Oikawa, too, for that matter.

 

It was probably a terrible idea to leave them alone.

 

By the time Akaashi has picked light bulbs from the back shelf, Yamaguchi has wandered off to somewhere else within the store.  He finds him staring intently at cheap bags of sour candy a few aisles over.

 

“You hate sour,” Akaashi reminds him.  He always eats two pieces, is horrified, and the rest goes to Terushima whenever he next comes around.

 

“But I _want_ it,” Yamaguchi argues.

 

“But you _hate_ it.”

 

_“Akaashi.”_

 

He lets Yamaguchi toss two bags into the basket.

 

“We’re out of dog treats,” Yamaguchi says, leading Akaashi through the aisles.  He walks slowly, gingerly, trying not to pull a stitch in his side.  Akaashi can’t be surprised he came, though, because Yamaguchi will take any distraction he can on days like this.

 

Akaashi makes a note to get some better pain killers.  Sugawara owes him some favors.

 

“Hey, can cats eat dog treats?” Yamaguchi asks.  He stares intently at the different boxes on the shelf, like he always does, as if the strays they bring in really know the difference between price marks.  “Like, is there a real difference in what they put in them, or is it like how they put a pink label on, like, deodorant just to charge extra money?”

 

Akaashi gives him a look that clearly shows that he has no idea.  He and Kenma are supposed to be the experts, who’ve googled the answers to all these questions long ago.

 

“Remind me to ask Kenma,” Yamaguchi says, returning his attention to to the dog treats.

 

Akaashi lets his gaze wander down the aisle, lets his thoughts slip for a moment.  Something strikes, and it’s stupid, it’s _useless_ but he figures there’s no harm in asking,

 

“Is cumin safe for cats?”

 

 _“Cumin?”_  Yamaguchi gives him a look that clearly shows _he_ has no idea.  Probably also shows that Akaashi is stupid.  “I have no idea.  Are you feeding the cats cumin?  Do we even _have_ cumin?”

 

“I don’t feed them anything,” Akaashi says.  “I’ve got enough to deal with with you lot.  Was just wondering.”

 

Yamaguchi narrows his eyes at him, but lets it slide.  “Whatever.  Think they have ointment that _doesn’t_ feel like you’re being stabbed again when you use it?”

 

“No,” Akaashi deadpans.  “It all hurts, and if you have a problem with that, then don’t get stabbed.”

 

_Remorse means regret.  Remorse means regret.  Regret means—_

 

He should’ve been there.  To keep them safe.

 

 _“Don’t get stabbed,”_ Yamaguchi mimics, pitching his voice in what Akaashi assumes is the least flattering manner he can.  “I’ll do whatever I please, thanks.”

 

Akaashi rolls his eyes.  “You spend too much time with Kenma.”

 

“Because mother isn’t around,” Yamaguchi sniffs, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye.  “I have no choice but to spend my time with all the neighborhood criminals, because at least _they_ give me attention.”

 

“You’re so overdramatic,” Akaashi tells him.  The guilt weighs down his bones.  If he had just _been there_ —  If he was _better—_

 

It’s as they’re walking back that Yamaguchi takes sight of the bar.  “Don’t you hang out there all the time, like some sad old man?”

 

“I like to go there, yes,” Akaashi says.  “It’s not sad.”

 

“You don’t even like alcohol.  What, cute bartender or something?  Got a crush?  Are you in _love_ , Akaashi?”

 

Akaashi glares, ignores the weight, the weight, the _weight_ —

 

“I’ll stab you again myself.”

 

“Love you, too.”

 

The sun has long since set, and all that’s ahead is the black street and the dark sky, slipping together between the buildings.  If Akaashi really looks, he can see the seam between them, tinted grey.

 

Regret means having to admit to himself that he fucked up Yamaguchi’s entire life.


	5. sweating all your sins out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ain't no point in tryna pick me up when i'm down](https://youtu.be/HQuv78DyuFw)  
>  yeah, you can stick out your hand  
> and you can lean towards the ground.  
> i'll be tryna suck all of the liquid out the dirt,  
> tryna catch a curve, digging my own grave

Akaashi pulls some strings.

 

It does not take long before a package arrives at his door, containing security camera footage and a list of names.  A photo, of a man he recognizes, who he can still envision in his mind as an unconscious body on his living room floor, who wouldn’t take the damn hint to stay away.

 

He does not tell his boys.  They’re starting to sleep through the night again.  Akaashi is not going to ruin that.

 

* * *

 

He’s developed a habit of staying until closing at the bar, and Bokuto has developed a habit of walking halfway home with him.  Halfway, always, because Akaashi always insists they part ways before Bokuto can find out where he lives. Less chance of someone else tracing the steps.  Less chance of Bokuto getting hurt, and Akaashi fucking up his life, too.

 

“Yukie’s mad at me,” Bokuto announces as they walk along the edge of the street.  His arms swing loose at his sides, and there’s a little bounce in his step that does not belong here and does not belong with the words he’s saying.  But Akaashi is not stupid enough to act like he can ever know everything about how Bokuto thinks.

 

“Why is that, Bokuto-san?” Akaashi asks, when a prolonged pause indicates he’s not going to continue.

 

“I was looking for another job.” Bokuto kicks a pebble along.  He turns to Akaashi with a bittersweet expression. “I don’t know anything ‘bout alcohol, Akaashi.  I don’t drink, ‘cause I worry about, like— y’know, my parents were addicted to lots of terrible things, and I don’t want to take chances with it.  So I don’t really know a thing about mixing drinks, which is why Yukie kinda set me to making your drinks in the first place, because you don’t drink, either, so she figured it didn’t matter I don’t know anything.  But. You know. I’m not fit for the bar, so I was looking at maybe applying somewhere else. And Yukie’s totally pissed. I didn’t think she’d be that offended.”

 

Akaashi doesn’t know what to say to that, but he imagines he shouldn’t anyway.  Sometimes Bokuto just wants to talk, get all his thoughts out, and doesn’t need Akaashi to respond in any way.  So he says nothing. He thinks about the package hiding under his mattress, and the text on his phone that he has yet to send.

 

He’s only known Yamaguchi a little longer than a year.

 

“Bokuto-san.”

 

Bokuto looks over, eyebrows raised, waiting.  He slows his stride, only enough that Akaashi barely notices.  “Yeah, ‘Kaashi? You don’t have to apologize or anything, like how people always say sorry for things that aren’t their fault — I don’t really get that.  And I mean, I’m gonna stay, and Yukie’ll be over it in the morning anyway—”

 

“You have a cat.”

 

“Hey, yeah! You remembered!”  Bokuto says, as if it’s unexpected, as if Akaashi hasn’t been paying attention.

 

Akaashi hesitates, trying to pick out the right words.  Trying to decide if he should say them at all. But he figures, he has no reason not to, if it’s Bokuto.  “If your cat came home with a broken leg, you’d be upset, wouldn’t you?” Bokuto nods, silent. “And if you later found out it was because someone . . . kicked him.  Just because he’d stolen some food off their plate. Even though they had _plenty_.  What would you do?”

 

Bokuto stops walking, narrows his eyes with thought.  Akaashi has found that, when Bokuto’s really thinking, one eye always closes more than the other.  He tries to tell himself it isn’t somewhat endearing.

 

“I think I would be pretty mad,” Bokuto decides, turning to look at Akaashi.  “That’s a pretty shitty thing to do to a cat that doesn’t know any better. Really big overreaction.  Did someone hurt your cat, ‘Kaashi? _Do you have a cat?”_

 

“I don’t have a cat,” Akaashi tells him.  He has his boys. He has a list of names and the image of a floral tattoo.  He has a charge set in his veins and he’s ready to let it go off.

 

People used to tell him how much he reminded them of his father.  He does not like the thought that they might not be wrong. He is aching.

 

A single year, and he ruined his whole life.

 

He can’t meet Bokuto’s gaze as he admits, just barely loud enough to hear, “I think I’m quite terrible, Bokuto-san.”  He keeps his eyes focused on a flickering sign in one of the shops across the street. Why, exactly, does it matter so much to him whether Bokuto agrees?  Why does he _care—_

 

“You always leave a tip.”  Akaashi looks to find Bokuto staring intently back at him, and his breathing catches.  “When I started at the bar, Yukie told me a lot about you, you know.” Bokuto raises his voice a few octaves as he continues, “She said, ‘There’s this really shifty guy who comes in sometimes.  He’s not so bad. He never has a drop of alcohol, but he always leaves a nice tip.’ And she was right. Seriously, Akaashi, you know you could just go to McDonald’s and get the same thing for, like, way cheaper, right?  Probably better, too, I suck at making drinks.”

 

There’s a flash of light in Bokuto’s eye, and Akaashi almost has to hold back a smile.

 

“It’s the atmosphere,” Akaashi drawls.  This pulls a laugh out of Bokuto, this wide and open thing, and Akaashi feels it in his bones.  The charge, sparking, prepared to turn him to ash. The corners of his lips slide upward.

 

“Seriously, though, Akaash’,” Bokuto says, turning serious once again.  “You’re not as bad as you think you are. You’re not really _good_ , I don’t think — hey hey, don’t give me that look!  I’m being honest! You’re not good. But you always leave at tip, and you take care of stray cats, and— I mean, everyone does things they shouldn’t anyway, right?  I accidentally stole a bag of chips from the corner store once. So whatever it is, you’re not all bad, either.”

 

And perhaps it’s not burning.  It’s more like rust. Corroding away until there’s not enough left of him to keep him whole.  Just bone.

 

Akaashi Keiji.  Rust and bone.

 

* * *

 

He’s known Yamaguchi for a little over a year.  It was backwards, this time. This time, it was Yamaguchi saving Akaashi.

 

* * *

 

Kenma sends him a single text when it’s nearing six in the morning and he still isn’t home.  Akaashi tells him he has errands to run, and Kenma does not inform him that all the shops have yet to open at this hour.

 

Akaashi has connections with people he would rather he’d never met — a leering cat, conniving foxes.  These are the people who help him in taking care of business.

 

While there are no laws, there are rules, there is still an order.  These are the people who understand this. These are the people who know that it is not fair for Kenma and Yamaguchi to have an attempt on their lives over petty theft, no matter who they were up against.  This is an imbalance, and as much as Akaashi hates these people he has an in with, they are the ones who understand the need for justice.

 

Akaashi prefers not to get involved with the violence of things.  In a way, it’s luck that he knows someone like Kuroo, who is more than happy to pull a man with a dahlia tattoo out of his apartment in the middle of the night, and introduce him to a knife Akaashi should have never gifted him.  In a way, it’s luck that he knows the twins, who give him matching grins when he flashes them a photograph and requests they convince the man in it to find it in his heart to make an apology.

 

They all help him take care of delivering the message to the gang reckless enough to mess with his boys.

 

And then he goes home, and does not sleep for two days.

 

* * *

 

Akaashi was shot and bleeding at the edges of a dead end street, barely conscious enough to reply to Oikawa’s texts that no, he didn’t eat the last of the eggs, he doesn’t even like eggs, it was probably Terushima, for fuck’s sake, what does he even need them for, he sucks at cooking.  He did not plan on making it back to the apartment again, but he also didn’t have the courage to admit that to him or Kenma. All he could do was act like things were fine as he bled out and lost his breath.

 

(This is how it is, you see, with fragile souls marred with fracture lines.  Akaashi could not call on them for help, seeing as how if they could not save him, they’d have the guilt hanging over them forever.  Akaashi had already been cause for enough of their ruin.)

 

Yamaguchi found him there, and while he clearly did not understand Akaashi’s request for him not to call for an ambulance, he respected it.  He instead brought Akaashi to a vet two blocks over. It was an awkward walk with Yamaguchi having to support Akaashi’s weight the whole way, and Akaashi bled onto Yamaguchi’s shirt.

 

The vet pulled the bullet out of Akaashi’s side without asking questions, and stitched him up without commenting on the scars surrounding.  She said nothing of the burn marks, nothing of the long tears across his chest, despite the look on her face that said she wanted to.

 

Yamaguchi stayed with him.  Refused to let Akaashi go home alone, because “seriously, you’ll just pull a stitch and bleed out anyway, and all Yachi’s work will be for nothing.  She hates blood, you know.” When the cabs started running, he helped Akaashi wind bandages over his arms, his chest, helped him struggle into a shirt, and got him into a car whose driver did not have the same reservations about asking questions.  Akaashi answered none of them.

 

Akaashi did not try to keep him out of the apartment.

 

This, arguably, was his first mistake in the series of errors surrounding Yamaguchi.  Kenma and Oikawa were both there, waiting up for him, because that is how it goes when you do not trust the city to return the ones you love back to you in one piece.  As if Akaashi was ever whole to begin with.

 

They said nothing, but their expressions were enough to know Akaashi had fucked up by not calling for them.  He had _fucked up_ , and no one acknowledged it, and Oikawa’s voice was two levels too high as he cooed the question of who Akaashi’s friend was.

 

Yamaguchi fit in, in a way he should not have.  (Akaashi did not know this for some time. He did not find out what Yamaguchi had given up right then.)  He came around every few days, and Oikawa pulled him into his room to do _devils knew what_ , and Kenma grew frustrated with how good he was at Mario Kart.  Yamaguchi asked questions, that neither of them found issue with answering.  His laugh was full and loud and hopeful.

 

There was a spark alight in Yamaguchi’s eyes.

 

He moved in, properly, somewhere around three months later.  Around the same time Kenma and Oikawa first pulled him into assisting with some minor theft, from one of the local jeweler’s.  It felt like he’d been there for longer, then, with the fact that he’d already filled the dull apartment with plants he and Oikawa worked hard to keep alive, and there were paint spills and sketches of his on every available surface.

 

(He was a student.  A fucking art student with a shitty family but amazing friends, and he gave it all up, Akaashi let him give it _all up_ , for— for what?)

 

(For him to learn to pick pockets and fear sleep.  For him to help with jobs he had no business being a part of, to earn his first scars and worst night terrors, for fucking— for fucking _this_.  For this _hell_.)

 

(Yamaguchi slept with the lights on for a month the first time he was shot at, and Akaashi slept with a hollow feeling in his chest forever after.)

 

* * *

 

Yamaguchi was the only one of them who ever had a chance at being alive.  Akaashi can never give that back to him.


	6. your fractures turn to fault lines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [here's to me](https://youtu.be/CTSGd7F9atw)  
>  i'm on the edge of my seat,  
> bound to fall,  
> but i'm hoping you fall into me

Akaashi tries to at least be kind of surprised that Terushima isn’t really leaving.  He knows trust is a thin line, and when it comes to Kenma’s safety, Akaashi is generally walking it.  Because he gave Kenma a home, he gave him somewhere to sleep at night and a pillow to keep his knife under.  But he is also a magnet for the wrong kind of attention, and whenever Kenma is attacked, Akaashi knows he falls a little lower in Terushima’s eyes.

 

So Terushima stays in the apartment, watching over Kenma, instead of lurking around wherever the hell he calls his territory.  And it’s fine.

 

It’s just that he’s a _nuisance_.  When he doesn’t have to worry about Kenma’s wellbeing, he’s making a mess of the kitchen in failed attempts to make fancy mochi, or he’s screwing with Yamaguchi’s plants, or breaking shit, or just—

 

“I know I said I’m above outright murder, but I’m thinking about retracting that.”  Oikawa glares out Akaashi’s bedroom door to where Terushima is on the couch, Kenma playing a video game in his lap.  Oikawa’s definitely not supposed to be in here, but Akaashi figures it’s better than forcing him out by Terushima. Less destructive this way.

 

They don’t fight, because to fight with Terushima is to hurt Kenma, and none of them are capable of doing that intentionally.  But there’s passive aggression, petty remarks and okay, _sure_ , sour candy is literally the most disgusting thing, but _if it’s going to piss him off then I’m going to eat all of it_.

 

(Yamaguchi has been in his room with a stomachache all evening.)

 

“Unless you have an airtight alibi, I wouldn’t recommend it,” Akaashi tells him.

 

“Or _you_ could hook me up with one of your _friends_.”

 

The look Akaashi gives him is enough to shut Oikawa up for a while.

 

Akaashi likes to pretend, as much as he can, like this isn’t his life.  That he is not capable of monstrous things. He can’t blame his boys for not knowing how hard it hits when they bring these things up so casually, but he also doesn’t have to act like he’s pleased with it.

 

“I’m going with you to your shitty bar tonight,” Oikawa eventually announces, spinning to put his back to the door.  “I wanna get drunk.”

 

Akaashi turns away from his desk and the bills he’s been trying to pay for hours.  “You don’t drink.”

 

“I mean it!” Oikawa says.  “I’m going to get wasted. Trashed.   _Shit faced_.  How many synonyms do you need to get it through that beautiful thick skull of yours?  I’ve got plenty.”

 

“ _None_.  You hate alcohol, and I know you hate it more than you hate Terushima.  You’ll be just as sober as you are now.”

 

Oikawa groans and falls backwards to sprawl across the floor, with all of his usual flair for dramatics.  “Can’t you support me just _once_ , Aka-chan?  That’s all I ask for.  A _yes, Oikawa, you’re so right_ every once in a while would be nice.”

 

Akaashi snorts a laugh.  “No.”

 

“You’re the worst.  The _worst_ , Aka-chan.  I ought to just up and leave one of these days.”

 

“Yes, Oikawa, you’re _so_ right.”

 

“Aka-chan!”

 

“You’re expensive,” Akaashi tells him, turning away to hide his smile.  “I can’t afford to keep paying the water bill for your hour-long showers.”

 

“Fuck you, you’re the worst, can we please go get not-drunk?” Oikawa whines.

 

Yamaguchi, despite how sick he complains he feels, comes along, because “your sad old man bar sounds better than the possibility of my eyebrows being singed off again.”

 

(It’s almost funny how Akaashi never thought it would be Terushima who sent his worlds collapsing in on each other.  Of course it would be him. _Of course_ he would be the catalyst.)

 

* * *

 

Akaashi was alone in the city for six years.   A new start like a fresh wound, of scrounging up whatever food he could find, breaking into empty apartments just to have a place to sleep for the night.  Doing favors for unsavory souls to get his name cleared and to keep him safe from unfamiliar devils.

 

It’s where he picked up on new survival skills where the old ones didn’t fit.  Cowering didn’t work in the city amongst all that lurked in the shadows. If he wanted to live he had to learn to fight back, had to learn to stop fearing the shouts and flames and gunpowder echoes.  He learned to pick pockets, how to lie through the skin of his teeth and make himself believe the words just as much as anyone else.

 

Kuroo was the first one who ever caught him, trying to take his wallet out of a coat pocket deeper than Akaashi was expecting.  It wouldn’t be the last time Kuroo pulled a knife on him, but it would be the last time Akaashi wasn’t prepared for it. (He was also the one to introduce Akaashi to a grimy bar in the dark of the city, where the manager liked to ask too many questions but strayed away from the ones Akaashi didn’t want to answer, and where Akaashi found some semblance of safety.  Somewhere that he forgot about the skin he lived in, just for the while.)

 

Akaashi got a place to sleep, be it on Kuroo’s couch or one of his— well.  Friends was never the right term. Kuroo has always avoided ties like that.  More like the people he had a temporary truce with. People like Suga, who passed on the best methods of committing fraud of all sorts; like the swans, who held the confidence to get whatever they wanted without having to ask about it; the twins, who were monstrous and entirely unapologetic for it.

 

He learned to become the devils he feared.  And then he learned to fear himself.

 

* * *

 

He knows before they’re even at the door to Shinya no Fukurou that Oikawa’s going to complain about it.  He won’t like the music, it’s too crowded, _there are bullet holes in the wall, Aka-chan, that’s so tacky._  There are reasons Akaashi has stayed with this bar, and they lie in everything Oikawa hates about it.

 

But if he thinks he can call the music trashy, he’s got another thing coming.

 

“This is so gross,” Oikawa says, following Akaashi in.  “The floors are sticky, Aka-chan. You know how expensive my shoes are?”

 

“Yes, I do, I paid for them.”  He pulls on Oikawa’s sleeve to steer him away from the bar counter, leading him instead to his usual corner booth.  Yamaguchi follows close enough to step on Akaashi’s heels. “We’re not sitting up there.”

 

“Why _not_ , that’s where you’re _supposed_ to sit, that’s where it’s more _fun_.   _Live_ a little, maybe.”

 

Akaashi has come to terms with the fact that he is far from ever achieving that, and tells him to sit down and deal with it.

 

Yamaguchi slips into the booth against Akaashi’s side, and Oikawa slumps down directly across from them.  It’s still a waste of the size of the booth, to only have the three of them, but it’s not like anyone’s ever complained, and it’s not like Akaashi would ever move if they did anyway.

 

“How’re you gonna get any drinks back here?  You picked the most secluded corner, no one’s gonna even know we’re back here,” Oikawa mutters.

 

“Oh, shut up.”

 

“ _You_ shut up.”

 

Akaashi rolls his eyes, but there’s a fond smile on his face, and Yamaguchi is leaning heavy against his shoulder.  It’s not so bad.

 

“Akaashi!” Bokuto looks surprised as he bounds over to the table.  Oikawa reels back, and the look he exchanges with Yamaguchi is _far_ too pleased.  “‘Kaashi, you brought friends!”

 

“Aka-chan, you _have a friend?_ “ Oikawa looks like he’s going to burst.

 

_“I was right,”_ Yamaguchi breathes out.

 

Akaashi is regretting letting either of them tag along.

 

“Bokuto-san.” He will not acknowledge how Yamaguchi is pinching his arm.  “This is Yamaguchi and Oikawa.”

 

“Oh!” Bokuto’s whole face lights up, and Akaashi feels it in his chest, like sinking stones.  “Oh, you mean—! Okay!” His smile looks like it’s going to split, and he’s bouncing on his toes, and it’s too much life.  It’s too much joy. Yamaguchi is going to leave a bruise. “Drinks? Do they drink, Akaash’, or—”

 

“ _Yes_.”

 

“Absolutely not.”

 

“C’mon, you’re so fucking _lame_ —”

 

“No alcohol, please, Bokuto-san.”

 

“Fuck you, Aka-chan.”

 

Bokuto is positively _beaming_.

 

Yamaguchi barely even waits for him to be out of earshot before shoving at his shoulder.  “I _knew_ it.  I _knew_ you were in love with one of the bartenders.”

 

Akaashi nearly chokes.  “I am not in love with Bokuto-san.  That’s not— _Tadashi_.”

 

“You think he’s cute, though,” Yamaguchi says.

 

“You’re _interested_ , though.” Oikawa leans onto the table, chin cradled in his hands.  “Is this why you don’t let us come here with you? So you can keep _Bokuto-san_ for yourself?”

 

“I have never once told you you couldn’t come here,” Akaashi says.  “You all stayed away of your own volition.”

 

“He’s not as cute as the grumpy bakery boy, but he’s not bad.  ‘Specially for someone as stingy as _you_.”

 

“ _What’s he like?”_  Yamaguchi murmurs.  Akaashi thinks about a petite blonde girl stitching up his wounds, a snarky boy that comes out only in whispered stories in Kenma’s room late at night.  Yamaguchi never got a single fucking chance at _anything_ —

 

“Better than all you assholes could ever hope to be.”  Akaashi glances down to where Yamaguchi is looking at him with eyes still hopeful, and sighs. _He’s like sunshine.  Like gold and sunshine._  “He has no concept of how much sugar is too much.  Knows a lot of ridiculously obscure music, talks nonstop.  He has a really ugly cat.”

 

“You’ve seen his cat!” Yamaguchi bolts upright, his eyes darting between him and Oikawa.

 

“In _pictures_.”

 

“ _Aka-chan’s in love_.”

 

“I will _end you_.”

 

Three drinks slide across the table, and Akaashi looks up to find Bokuto has returned.  If previous experience has taught him anything, it’s that he’s not going away any time soon.  For the first time since he initially met Bokuto, Akaashi does not want this.

 

“Akaashi’s told me about you!” is the first thing out of Bokuto’s mouth, and the first nail in Akaashi’s coffin.  Oikawa’s foot taps against Akaashi’s ankle under the table, hard and fast. “His family!” The tapping stops. “Hey hey, you gotta tell me ‘bout ‘Kaashi, he’s so cryptic all the time.   _Does he really suck that much at poker?”_

 

“I do not _suck_ at poker—”

 

“Aka-chan sucks at _cheating_ at poker,” Oikawa says, “which translates into him losing every game.”

 

“Because _all the rest of you_ cheat,” Akaashi fires back.

 

“Sorry we’re not shit at it!  Get better or get out.” Oikawa’s feet land on top of Akaashi’s and stay there, and Akaashi _knows_ he has things to say once Bokuto is gone.

 

“He’s bad at every card game,” Yamaguchi tells him.  “He didn’t even know how to play Go Fish until a few months ago.”

 

“ _None of you ever told me how,_ “ Akaashi says.  “You’re all assholes.”

 

Bokuto’s laugh carries through the whole bar, and it’s entirely unfair.  Akaashi has done terrible things, and knows in his bones he deserves their shit, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.

 

“He’s a sore loser,” Oikawa coos.

 

Akaashi narrows his eyes at him and debates whether it’s worth it to go into detail of how big of a fit Oikawa threw the last time he drove off a cliff in Mario Kart.  He has _no right_ to act all high and mighty.

 

“Oh! Me too, Akaash’!” Bokuto says.  “Well, like, that’s not usually what Konoha says, it’s way more rude than that.  Hey hey, we can team up sometime.”

 

Yamaguchi is leaning way harder into Akaashi’s side, and he’s totally not subtle.  He’s totally not _right_.

 

“Bokuto-san, you have a cat, don’t you?” Yamaguchi says.  Akaashi tries his best to be subtle about glaring daggers at him.  “Akaashi said something about it—”

 

Bokuto’s face reflects sunbeams, and Yamaguchi’s totally not _wrong_ either.  “Yeah! Yeah, yeah, Cumin!”  Yamaguchi chokes on his drink.  Akaashi is suddenly coming to the realization of so many more regrets.  “‘Cause he’s the same color, you know? Oh, gosh, ‘Kaashi, you gotta meet him.  You like cats, right?”

 

“He likes cats,” Oikawa confirms.  “He just pretends to be pissy when Yama-chan and Neko-chan bring in strays.”

 

“He secretly loves them,” Yamaguchi says.  “I know he lets them sleep in his bed while he’s working.”

 

He should’ve left them to Terushima.

 

“You’ve _gotta_ meet Cumin, Akaash’.  I’ve met your family, you know, you gotta meet mine!”

 

Akaashi feels it in his chest, this weight.  It’s not entirely foreign, but it’s been so long since the last time it’s come.  He learned to stop wishing for things around the same time he first saw a man murdered before him, learned to stop thinking he was worthy of things like warmth and stardust and wonder somewhere in the back of a musty closet where he pressed against burned skin hard enough to black out the memory of anything after.  Akaashi does not know what to do with this _hope_.

 

Bokuto’s whisked away shortly, when the angry looking bartender tells him they need help in the kitchen, and Bokuto promises to come right back.  Akaashi is hoping he breaks that. Just until he can find his breath again.

 

“You _told him about us_ ,” Oikawa says the instant he’s gone.  It’s not accusatory. More awestruck than anything.  Oikawa has never told Akaashi anything about what he lost to have ended up here.

 

“You called us _family_ ,” Yamaguchi adds.  There’s a waver to his voice that Akaashi can’t stand to hear.  It’s the same one that comes with a heavy, breathless chest, one that only ever results in agony.  “You can’t tell me you’re not in love, Akaashi, you never tell anyone _anything_.”

 

“Aka-chan, don’t let it go to waste,” Oikawa says.  It’s the quietest Akaashi’s ever heard his voice. “You don’t have to give up everything.”

 

Akaashi doesn’t have it in him to tell him he’s wrong.  He doesn’t have it in him to really _know_ that he’s wrong.  He wants him to be.  He wants so desperately for Oikawa to be mistaken, to know that if Akaashi ever held onto anything _good_ , it would ruin them.  It would ruin him.

 

It would ruin Bokuto.

 

Of all the sins building up Akaashi’s veins, this is not one he could bear.

 

“You gotta meet his cat,” Yamaguchi tells him.  “And then tell me about it. Please, Akaashi.”

 

In the back of his mind, he hears Yamaguchi’s whispers of _Kei_ , of stories of back aisles in libraries and empty studios and paint on cheeks, of the only nice things he’s truly hated to let go of.

 

Oikawa and Yamaguchi walk home without him, with promises to stay safe, as long as Akaashi promises not to throw it all away.

 

“Give Bokkun an extra kiss for me, would you?” Oikawa says with a false lilt in his voice.  “Someone like that deserves it.”

 

Bokuto comes back soon after, and Akaashi’s throat feels tight at the sight of his broad smile.

 

_What have you done to me?_

 

_What have I_ let _you do to me?_

 


	7. always been a coward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [i don't care if it hurts,](https://youtu.be/q5gQtyobFLg)  
>  i'll pay my weight in blood  
> to feel my nerves wake up.  
> so love me now, or let me go,  
> let me feel these highs and lows  
> before the doors to my heart close

 

When Akaashi was six years old, he watched as his father ended a man’s life with a single bullet and a remorseless expression.  A few weeks after that, he learned better than to ever speak of it again, to speak of anything again — to _speak_ again.  A lesson taught through burn marks down his arms and screaming echoes in his head.  He did not sleep for months, and never with the lights off. The back of the hall closet became his refuge, and his father turned from the man who told him bed time stories of beggars thieving from the rich, into the demons that hid in the space beneath his mattress.

 

Ten-year-old Akaashi knew better than to cry at the sound of gunfire, than to speak any word of the terror sounding from the floor below.  The noise never stopped ricocheting through his mind, and his nightmares were full of his father’s ruthless face. His body bore the permanent reminders of what happened when he acknowledged the devils that crept through the daylight in pressed suits and neatly knotted ties.  He began to hide the scars under carefully wrapped bandages, to avoid all the prying eyes that suspected too much.

 

At fourteen, Akaashi was well aware of what the various, intricate tattoos on their house guests all stood for and what the people who wore them were capable of.  At fourteen, Akaashi was terrified of ever becoming like the men who drew death with their fingertips. At fourteen, he did anyway.

 

The day Akaashi left the home he grew up in would forever be burned into his mind as a body sprawled across the living room floor and sticky black blood staining his hands.  His first several weeks alone were defined through the sobs that wracked through his body at the fact that he could not find the guilt he should have been feeling anywhere within his bones.

 

Akaashi was a fool to ever think he wouldn’t end up here.  To think that a man with ghosts and gunpowder coursing through his veins would ever amount to anything worthy.

 

He picks at the edges of the bandages at his wrist as the panic rings through his body.  He should not be here. He should not be here. _He should not be here._

 

_Haven’t you been cause for enough skeletons?_

 

He can hear Bokuto laughing from behind the bar, and he knows that the aching _want_ squeezing the air out of his lungs makes him a monster.  He has found the guilt. It will never let him go.

 

* * *

 

“I really like your family, ‘Kaashi,” Bokuto says.  He’s seated on the table, legs swinging above the floor, terrible patchwork jacket draped over his lap.  The bar is closing soon. “They’re really great. I mean, you know, of course, because they’re yours, so—” Bokuto looks away, redirecting his gaze to where Shirofuku is cursing out the bartender Akaashi has come to know as Konoha.  “You know, for as bad as this place is, I don’t think I’d ever wanna go anywhere else.”

 

He’s got this faraway look in his eye, and Akaashi _gets it._  He recognizes within it the warped skin that came from Kenma trying to drive a knife through him in the first week they met, and the nights he’s since spent with his head in his lap while he talks about the plot to the video game he’s playing.  It’s that same feeling of Akaashi listening to Oikawa crying himself to sleep at night for weeks before he eventually crept into Akaashi’s room and curled up on the other edge of his bed, to sleep soundly through the whole night. The mess Oikawa makes of the kitchen every time he cooks and how familiar he is with the local fire department that’s had to answer to smoke alarm after smoke alarm going off at failed omelets.  Yamaguchi, tucked against Akaashi’s side on the couch as he whispers of things he should have never given up, and mornings where his laughter is the only sound filling the apartment.

 

The city has brought down hell around Akaashi, around all of his boys.  But it’s also given him so much he would give his life to keep. That he _has_ given his life to keep.

 

Akaashi has given up everything to be here.  There is nothing left of him now; no unfractured pieces to his mind, or skin clear of hauntings.

 

Bokuto looks back to Akaashi, and Oikawa’s voice whispers in his mind, _don’t throw this away._

 

But it’s not a matter of throwing anything away.  It’s more that Akaashi has no fucking clue how to take hold of this in the first place anymore.

 

* * *

 

Akaashi made his connections and did the necessary favors to get by in a city he was still terrified of.  This was not the back of a closet that he could cower in, there was nowhere to hide. It was a gaping maw ready to swallow him whole the second he lost his foothold, and Akaashi had long since had all the fight drained out of his fists.

 

He kept to the shadows.  The less anyone could see of him — the less he could see of _himself_ — the better.  He rarely slept, had to remind himself to find food and eat.  Panic regularly seized his throat with every midnight footstep he heard coming by, sure that this was it, that he’d been found, he was going to be forced to eat his sins and his drawn out death would finally reach its conclusion.

 

It took two years to find an apartment where the landlord overlooked the fact that a boy that young was not fit to be on his own.  It was ugly and the faucets leaked and the heating was broken, but it was Akaashi’s. It wasn’t safe, he knew, and the door opened even when locked if the knob was jimmied the right way.  But it was better than strangers’ couches where he sometimes woke up to drunken stumbling ins at three in the morning, or muffled gunshots, or police breaking down the door over stolen goods.

 

There would be no more hiding.  No more barricading closet doors or wiping away terrified tears or listening to the echoed wails that rattled around in his skull.

 

He did what it took to survive.  Dirty deeds and risky jobs, and all of it made him feel like rotting, but he was already past the point of salvation so what did it matter?  He showed up when Kuroo or Suga or Semi asked, called on the twins and snakes when he wanted help.

 

The only condition he held himself to was the promise of no more bodies.  No more blood to stain his hands.

 

Which was fine.  It was fine. Akaashi was _fine._  No bodies, no blood, just jobs for Kuroo and requesting Hiroo’s aid with the riskier chances.

 

Take in the stray cat, give him a place to sleep even though he was quick with his knife, look to Suga for extra work to afford some food to feed the lost boy struck through with fear.

 

There were no deaths.  And yet—

 

Akaashi wishes he had accounted for the fact that there are worse things.

 

Akaashi wishes he had accounted for attachment.

 

For the fear he felt the first time Kenma was attacked solely for his association with Akaashi.

 

He worked himself into ruin.  It was different when he was only worried about his own skin.  Now he had someone else’s soul on the line, and he would give up every nice thing he had to keep him safe.  To prevent him from ever having Akaashi’s same nightmares.

 

He could afford no distractions.  And that was fine, too. He’d never wasted time seeking any out in the first place.

 

Another thing he hadn’t accounted for, until he met an eccentric bartender with a smile that shook him to his bones: distractions were perfectly capable of finding Akaashi if Akaashi would not go in search of them himself.

 

* * *

 

“There’s another, right?” Bokuto asks once they’ve exited the bar.  They aren’t going anywhere. They’ve been standing off to the side of the door, moving towards no destination.  Akaashi isn’t sure where he’d like to go, anyway. Not sure where he’s supposed to go. “You’ve got three, but only two came.”

 

Akaashi nods.  “Kenma. Not a bad thing he didn’t come along.  When all three are together, it’s a mess.” Two are manageable, three means snarling insults and baseballs going through newly replaced windows.  “The bar would’ve burned down.”

 

Bokuto laughs, wide and open, and Yamaguchi is telling him in the back of his mind that they didn’t ever ask for him to give anything up for them.  “I wanna meet him sometime. I wanna know what he’s like.”

 

“He’s a menace,” Akaashi tells him.  “He and Yamaguchi once spent two weeks forgoing sleep to convince Oikawa the apartment was haunted.”  As if Oikawa wasn’t already a suffering insomniac, and as if Akaashi needed him stumbling into his room in the middle of the night because he couldn't sleep in his own bed, _there’s a_ ghost _trying to steal my_ soul.

 

(He had not appreciated Akaashi’s remark of “What soul?” but did stay the entire night huddled under Akaashi’s covers.  And the entire week after that.)

 

(One day he's going to repay Kenma and Yamaguchi for that.)

 

Bokuto is beaming, his face glowing warm under the streetlights.  “Your family’s pretty great, Akaash’. I’m glad you’ve got ‘em.” The stones in Akaashi’s chest multiply and sink, and he can’t quite get enough air into his lungs.  “Hey, Akaashi, if you’re not—” Bokuto’s gaze drops and he kicks a scuffed shoe at the pavement. “If, you know, you’re not going right home, you could— you could come meet Cumin. I mean it that I think you’d like him.”  He looks back up at Akaashi with a hopeful expression, and Akaashi hasn’t let himself cry since the night he scrubbed the dark, sticky blood off his hands.

 

_He should not be here._

 

_He does not deserve this._

 

Akaashi cannot say no to Bokuto.  They start down the street at a slow pace.

 

_You don’t have to give up everything._

 

“I don’t live so far,” Bokuto promises.  “It’s not the nicest place, but it’s mine, you know?  I’ve got a bed and Cumin and, like, a _really_ nice view of the alley behind the liquor store.”  He smiles at his own joke, and Akaashi _wants._  “I should probably move.  But that’s the first place I’ve ever had for myself, it feels wrong to leave it.  And I like the neighbors, mostly, so.” Bokuto shrugs, and the night dissolves into a loose silence.

 

“Bokuto-san,” Akaashi says after a moment, “are you ever scared you made a mistake?”

 

He is  _rusting_.

 

Bokuto pauses in his stride, contemplating this.  He watches Akaashi with a careful gaze, and when he speaks, his voice is gentler than Akaashi’s ever known anything to be.  “I’ve done a lot of dumb things, Akaash’,” he says. “I’m not really the smartest, you know, and I don’t always think first.  Yukie always gives me hell for it. But like— that’s how you grow, isn’t it? You can be impulsive and stupid and make mistakes as long as you learn from it, I think.  I think . . . I’ve stopped really being scared of mistakes. If they happen, then cool! I own up to it! But changing isn’t so scary all the time. Growing isn’t scary.”

 

Akaashi’s chest feels tight, and he opens and closes his mouth without being able to find the right words, and he wants he wants he _wants—_

 

“Bokuto-san.”  His voice comes out choked, and this is a terrible idea, probably.  He is going to regret this, severely, he’ll feel the guilt for the weeks and months and years to come over the ruin this is sure to cause.  But Bokuto is standing too close in front of him and his face is lit in a neon glow, and Akaashi can’t stop the aching _want_ flooding down through his fingertips.  Can’t stop seeing the mixed pain and awe in Yamaguchi’s face as he pointed out that Akaashi really truly never tells anyone _anything,_ and he probably owes it to him to do this stupid, stupid thing.  “Bokuto-san, can I kiss you?”

 

Bokuto looks poised to say something, but nothing is coming out, and instead he just gives the slightest nod, and Akaashi’s fingers twist within themselves.  He cannot bear to look at Bokuto as he takes a half-step forward.

 

He has given everything up.  Thrown away chance after chance at getting out of here and getting better to save his boys instead.  He’s taken jobs to keep them safe, cashed in on favors to keep them alive. In long past evenings spent sprawled across Akaashi’s bed, Oikawa used to talk about how the heart always speaks of desire, that it only hurts when you refuse to let it strive for anything.  He thinks about the one and only time Kenma’s ever cried over love that Akaashi had never known about. Yamaguchi makes him promise every morning before he leaves to come home alive.

 

Akaashi is very, very tired of feeling like he hasn’t done that since he was six years old and still thought his father to be a good man.

 

There’s the light brush of lips against his, and Akaashi leans further into it, and he has never been quite so aware of his own heartbeat.  This consistent rhythm reminding him he exists, he’s here, he’s _real_.  His fingers curl around the lapels of Bokuto’s jacket, eyes squeezing tighter shut, and he knows he’s crying as he tilts his head and pulls Bokuto closer in.

 

Bokuto must know it, must feel it, but he only steadies a gentle hand on Akaashi’s waist and keeps him held close.  It’s slower and softer and kinder than anything Akaashi’s ever deserved, and he doesn’t want to give this up. He cannot bear the thought of throwing this away.

 

Just once, he’s going to let himself _want._


	8. your heart is still violent, the sun still rises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [so take away](https://youtu.be/U74KUeM0Ezc)  
>  all my sin  
> give me a sweet prayer  
> on my lips

Akaashi cries — silent silent always silent — and Bokuto lets him, asking no questions because Bokuto will never push for answers that he knows Akaashi is not ready to give.  He holds him close and talks about dandelions, and when did people start wishing on those, anyway, and how come only some are yellow? Dandelions, and gossip he’s read in a magazine, and the time Washio and Komi got them kicked out of the local library in a debate over breakfast cereals.  His voice never wavers. His hands are steady on Akaashi’s shoulders, his back, and there are feather-light kisses on his cheeks where he knows the tears are falling.

 

They make it, eventually, slow-going, up to Bokuto’s apartment.  Bokuto never comments on the tears that have finally stopped rolling down Akaashi’s face, and Akaashi shoves his guilt way deep down.  He is allowed one thing. Just this once.

 

Bokuto leads him in by the hand, fingers loosely threaded through Akaashi’s.  “Sorry, it’s a little messy, but it’s at least half Cumin’s fault.” There’s a tint of blush to Bokuto’s cheeks, and it sends Akaashi’s heart to his throat.  He should not be here but he would give anything to get to stay.

 

It’s not entirely unlike Akaashi’s first apartment.  There’s more furniture, and it feels far more lived in, but the lighting is the same sort of dim and there’s the same damp chill in the air.  Akaashi has forgotten, in the time he’s lived with Yamaguchi, that it’s possible to live somewhere without plants and paintings taking up every available inch of free space.  There are socks and cat toys scattered around the floor, and a thick owl-patterned blanket hanging off the back of the couch. Everything is brightly colored and mismatched and very, very _Bokuto._

 

There is no ash, there are no blood stains.  It smells like cocoa.

 

“You want anything to drink, ‘Kaashi?” Bokuto asks.  “Eat? I don’t have a ton, but, I mean, if you want anything—”

 

“I’m okay, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi tells him.  “Thank you.”

 

Bokuto nods and nods and pulls Akaashi further into the room, and before they’re even halfway to the couch, a hideously yellow-brown cat with a lopsided walk creeps out from down the narrow hall.  As soon as it spots them both, it darts towards them faster than anything with a missing leg should at all be capable of. A grin immediately breaks out across Bokuto’s face, and he releases Akaashi’s hand so he can scoop the cat up in both arms.

 

“Akaashi!  This is Cumin!”  He holds the cat up closer to Akaashi’s face, and Akaashi tentatively holds a hand out towards it.  It sniffs Akaashi’s fingers for a moment before nudging his head against them, waiting to be pet. “Told you he’d like you.”

 

Bokuto’s smile is too bright, too warm, and Akaashi is going to self-destruct.

 

“He should have a prosthetic leg, but, like, that’s really expensive,” Bokuto says, filling in the quiet.  “And, like, the bar’s really great! You know, I love working there! But it doesn’t leave much extra money after I pay rent and everything, so.  I’m trying to save money for ‘im.” Bokuto lifts the cat closer to his own face, smile going soft as he kisses the top of its head. “Think he’s gotten used to this, though.  He’s really great, Akaash’. Super smart.”

 

Bokuto turns the soft expression onto Akaashi, and Akaashi’s not sure what to do with himself.  He’s got collapsible lungs and they’ve finally stopped working.

 

Akaashi reaches out and strokes a hand carefully over the top of Cumin’s head.  He purrs, and Bokuto has this light in his eye, and it’s stealing Akaashi’s breath away but he can’t find it in himself to mind.

 

* * *

 

The first several weeks of knowing Bokuto, Akaashi was completely and entirely on edge.  He talked too much, too fast, had rapid-fire questions about every topic Akaashi wasn’t prepared for that he went ahead and answered himself anyway, spilled life out of his fingertips.  It was terrifying.

 

He didn’t shy back from Akaashi at all.  If anything, he pushed closer with every visit, more comfortable with his presence every time he served him, even though sometimes Akaashi had cuts along his cheek or blooming bruises across his throat or blood on his collar.  He never asked about it when Akaashi came in limping, or when he had bandages on the already minimal amount of visible skin. He leaned onto the table with hands and elbows, laughed loud and vibrant at his own words. He didn’t seem to mind that Akaashi didn’t have much to say.  He filled in all the gaps himself, and made drinks with too much sugar and cherry flavoring, and sometimes Akaashi would catch him humming along to the music that came through the static of the speakers.

 

All the tension in Akaashi’s shoulders slowly drained out in time.  His fingers stopped twitching every time he saw the head of white and grey hair moving through the crowd of the bar, and he stopped feeling the sharp spike of panic in his veins when he reached Akaashi’s table with a cheerful, “Hey hey hey!”  He learned to listen easy, not fearing for the inevitable questions about the jagged scar poking up from beneath the collar of his shirt, or the black eyes he came in with, or _hey have you been eating, Akaashi?_  Bokuto never asked the obvious things.  He gave Akaashi space and sometimes wordlessly dropped a plate of edamame or karaage on his table.

 

Akaashi answered the questions he _did_ ask from time to time.  Tried to give him some form of explanation for whether the moon got lonely, or _invertebrates are the ones without spines, Bokuto-san._  He got used to too-strong fruit flavorings.

 

Bokuto was full of miscellaneous information.  Facts about every type of animal — some Akaashi had never even heard of — or interesting tidbits about plants, and _space._  Bokuto sometimes lost enough track of time to talk for hours about space.  Akaashi never stopped him, and none of the other bartenders ever came to retrieve him, so Akaashi listened and tried to piece this image of Bokuto together with the one who couldn’t remember how to retie his apron because he was too fixated on talking about horseshoe crabs.  He had pictures to go with nearly every story he had to tell, sometimes pulling his phone out to show them to Akaashi, laughing when one of the other bartenders yelled at him for it.

 

He bounced on his toes when he got excited about things — which was regularly — and gestured wildly when he spoke and his laugh sounded of the inner workings of a supernova.  With everything he said, he gave up pieces of himself, genuine and honest and warm enough that Akaashi sometimes forgot not to give up some of his own pieces.

 

Sometimes Akaashi caught Shirofuku watching them from behind the counter.  Always with this half-smile he could never quite decipher. Something bittersweet.

 

Bokuto smiled through all his stories, and Akaashi thought maybe, in another life, another place, they could’ve been something more.

 

* * *

 

Bokuto fully meant it when he said Cumin only ever wanted to play and run.  Akaashi watches from the armrest of the couch as Bokuto dangles a mouse toy out in front of the cat, smile growing just a little wider every time he bats at it.  He doesn’t mind this. Doesn’t mind listening to his laugh or the cat’s small noises, doesn’t mind sitting back and watching the glow of Bokuto’s eyes in the dim light every time he glances over to say something.

 

It’s all words that mean little to Akaashi, but he hangs off every word about snail hibernation and what hydrangeas can stand for.  His fingers trace the edges of a bright yellow throw pillow and thinks that he does not want to belong anywhere else. Bokuto is sitting so close that every time he moves, his bicep bumps against Akaashi’s thigh.

 

Cumin runs off eventually with a squeaking carrot-shaped toy.  Bokuto watches him go, gaze lingering on the narrow hall for just a moment, gentle smile curling his lips.  When he looks up at Akaashi with the same golden glance, Akaashi feels the rush of the undercurrent in his veins, reminding him that he is _here._  The nagging _want_ hums through his bones.

 

Bokuto’s smile slips into something quieter and more subtle, and he’s not saying anything, and everything about him is turned soft in the low glow of the lamplight.  Akaashi reaches out, tentatively letting his fingers brush against the curve of his jaw, and Bokuto tilts his head into the touch. He doesn’t hesitate to stretch up to meet where Akaashi is beginning to lean down.

 

There’s violent life thrumming through his veins, coursing and screaming, the storm before the calm as Bokuto pulls Akaashi closer in, further down, and all of Akaashi’s thoughts blur into a haze.  Akaashi is a fractured mess, put back together again. An exploded star, destroyed into something new.

 

There’s shifting, readjusting, until Bokuto is hovering over Akaashi sprawled across the couch that’s not reasonably big enough for this, and then it’s Bokuto breathing Akaashi’s name against his lips, his hands restless, moving down Akaashi’s shoulders, his chest, his sides, gripping onto his hips.  But his fingers never stray under his sweater, he’s never against Akaashi’s skin.

 

He thinks Bokuto may have been paying as much attention to Akaashi as Akaashi’s been paying to him.

 

Perhaps Bokuto has been paying more attention.

 

Perhaps Akaashi is rotting.  Rust and bone. Ashes to ashes, stardust to dust.

 

Bokuto’s hands move back up, and Akaashi’s find their way into the soft strands of his hair, trying to angle him closer and trying to fit them both better together.  Bokuto’s fingers trace along Akaashi’s jaw, the back of his neck, and Akaashi’s skin burns with the touch.

 

He feels so completely _alive_ and has no idea what to do with that.  What that means.

 

When Bokuto eventually has to properly pull back, trying to suck air back into his lungs, his face is flushed and his expression so _open_ and Akaashi’s pulse is thrumming in his ears.  They could’ve been something more but this isn’t such a terrible alternative.

 

Bokuto _grins_ down at him, and Akaashi feels the life in his pulse that has been lacking for too long, and he could choke on the feeling.

 

“You’re really pretty, Akaash’, you know?” Bokuto breathes.

 

And Akaashi can only press a kiss to Bokuto’s lips, trail more along his jaw, down his neck.  Can only think that he really _really_ doesn’t want to throw this away.

 

“Bokuto-san,” Akaashi murmurs into the space where Bokuto’s neck meets his shoulder.  “Thank you.”

 

And he knows Bokuto doesn’t know half of what the words mean, _couldn’t_ know what half of what the words mean, but his voice is gentle when he says, “Always.  Always, Akaashi.”

 

Like a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i dont know how to write kissin n i'm never doin it again thank u


	9. a death like dominoes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ['Cause I'm fast enough to get in trouble](https://youtu.be/A3fmsM1JgaY)  
>  but not fast enough to get away.  
> And I'm old enough to know I'll end up dying  
> And not young enough to forget again.

Bokuto in the early morning is very different than the electric, glowing soul Akaashi knows from late nights.  He moves slower, his smile is quieter, his hair hangs soft and loose in front of his face and Akaashi can’t even try to convince himself that it doesn’t make his chest feel tight.  He still asks question after question from the moment he finds Akaashi has woken up on his couch, but his own answers come after longer pauses, his sentences are shorter and voice lower.

 

He makes eggs and offers Akaashi a warmer sweater and asks if he can kiss him before he does.  In another world, this could’ve been Akaashi’s life. Quiet mornings where he doesn’t worry about going home and finding out his boys have bled out, warm breakfasts and a cat that perches on his shoulder.  Someone to love him that he wouldn’t have to feel guilty about loving back. In another world, Akaashi’s life could have been so much softer. So much safer.

 

But this is not his reality.

 

He will not get endless mornings where Bokuto’s face looks soft in the low sun, because he has scars that cover every inch of skin and sometimes he has to do ugly deeds because someone has threatened to hurt his boys despite the fact that they themselves are innocent.  Akaashi’s got a black soul and he will not get to keep this. He does not get to live in that warm other world, and eventually he will have to return home and change out Yamaguchi’s bandages.

 

Bokuto does dishes and refuses to let Akaashi help, and tells him he’s pretty, tells him he’s beautiful, tells him he’s happy he’s here before he kisses him softer than anything he has ever been deserving of.  He offers to walk Akaashi home and he does not ask for the sweater back.

 

“Hey ‘Kaashi, you ever hear of moon trees?” Bokuto asks as they walk.  He sticks close to Akaashi’s side, and Akaashi wonders if he’ll take his hand again.  He hopes and hopes and hopes that he won’t.

 

“I have, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi says.  “I think if it’s been to space, Oikawa or Yamaguchi has told me about it.”

 

“It’s so cool!” Bokuto says, arms swinging wide.  “Taking seeds through space! Would’ve been even cooler if they really had grown all weird.  I mean, it’s still pretty neat, you know, those trees were in _space._  Hey hey, ’Kawa and Yamaguchi like space?  That’s so cool!”

 

Akaashi nods, gives Bokuto a quiet smile.  “They watch a lot of documentaries. Yamaguchi painted a whole mural in his room.”  He’d spent over a week painting it, still touches it up from time to time. Akaashi doesn’t think about what’ll happen the day they have to move.  “They have a lot of arguments about it.”

 

When Bokuto laughs, he throws his head back and his eyes always close and it’s so _bright._  So _alive._  Akaashi feels the thrumming _want_ in his fingertips and wraps his arms around his body, clutching the sides of Bokuto’s sweater.  Bokuto is grinning when he looks over at Akaashi and asks what they could possibly be arguing over, and when Akaashi starts to tell him about Oikawa’s firm belief in aliens (and ghosts and all things supernatural, really), Bokuto gets a light in his eye that Akaashi feels deep within his bones.

 

_You never tell anyone_ anything.

 

“Hey, Akaash’,” Bokuto says after a moment, “how’d you meet ‘em?”

 

Akaashi offers a wry smile and tries to think of the right way to word it, the right way to explain to him how they all crashed into his life without giving away their own heavy souls.

 

_You can’t tell me you’re not in—_

 

“Chance,” he tells him.  “By chance. I think . . . they all saved my life, Bokuto-san.”  They have tried to kill him, both accidentally and on purpose, time and time again.  But Akaashi thinks he wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. “Oikawa tried to blow me up.”

 

And Bokuto laughs, and laughs, and looks at Akaashi so warm he cannot handle it.

 

_You called us_ family.

 

There is so much Bokuto will never know.  So much Akaashi can never tell him. The wounds he’s stitched up, the nightmares that haunt him that are a little too specific, where his boys all bleed out before Akaashi can reach them.  But maybe Bokuto doesn’t have to know. Maybe the nights they spend cheating at poker and yelling at each other over bad musicals are enough. Akaashi thinks, that’s who his boys are. That’s who they would be if this were the world where Akaashi gets to hold Bokuto’s hand and wake up in a warm apartment.

 

In another world, Kenma spends his days on his DS and does not fear the ocean, and Oikawa attracts all the right attention from all the souls around him, and Yamaguchi is tender and warm to friends he never has to leave.  In another world, Akaashi has not taken this all away from them.

 

The swallowed stones in Akaashi’s chest are sinking.  Do killers ask for forgiveness? Are they ever allowed it?

 

Bokuto leaves Akaashi with the promise to see him later, with a brushed kiss against his cheek that _burns,_ with a gentle smile that’s even worse.

 

Sometimes Akaashi forgets that Bokuto is already in that other world, and Akaashi will eventually have to stop the delusion that one day he will be able to fully step into it.

 

* * *

 

They must have told Kenma.

 

All three of his boys are sprawled across the couch, watching Akaashi from the moment he walks in the door.  Waiting. Expectant. He’s grateful, at least, that Terushima will be missing all of this. Less grateful for the ringing silence that’s waiting for him to break it.

 

“You’ve been gone awhile, Aka-chan,” Oikawa says.  His expression reads _hope_ and Akaashi doesn’t know what to do with that.

 

In the back of his mind, Oikawa’s voice aches, _don’t let it go to waste._

 

“You’d better have pictures of this cat,” Kenma tells him.

 

“Sorry to disappoint,” Akaashi replies.  “Don’t you all have better things to be doing?”

 

“We haven’t seen you!” Oikawa says.  Everything about his casual tone reads false.  “Usually you’ve been home for _ages._ “

 

“How was your night?” Yamaguchi asks.  His voice betrays him even more than Oikawa’s.

 

Kenma’s eyes narrow.  “Is that your sweater?”

 

This is where the dam breaks.  Oikawa’s leaping forward, eyes wide, reaching out to tug at the fabric, and Yamaguchi is reeling back with a delighted gasp, and Akaashi wants to know when the hell they all got so invested in his life.  Why they’re trying to act like all these things Akaashi doesn’t deserve are so great. How he’s supposed to rid himself of the feeling of Bokuto’s fingers on his jaw.

 

_“Keiji, you’d better tell us everything,”_ Oikawa breathes.

 

Akaashi’s throat feels tight.

 

“It’s not— You make way too many assumptions.”

 

“You’ve gotta tell us,” Yamaguchi says.  “You _have_ to, Akaashi.”

 

“Please tell me you didn’t throw this away,” Oikawa says, and his voice is too soft, and Akaashi cannot bear this.   _“Please,_ Aka-chan, tell me you didn’t—“

 

“I didn’t throw anything away,” Akaashi tells him.  There’s no use in trying to fight this. He has to give it up, eventually.  So he lets himself be pushed onto the couch, waits for Oikawa and Kenma to stop fighting for the same spot next to him and for the petty insults to stop.  And then he tells them.

 

Not everything.  There is no need to tell them about the tears or the dandelions, or how Bokuto’s light touch raised his skin, or that he woke up to Cumin curled on his chest and Bokuto humming in the kitchen.  Just that— He didn’t throw this away.

 

He didn’t throw this away, even if he should have, and what is he doing he’s going to ruin Bokuto’s life, his warm and safe life with friends who love him and his hideous not-cat and—

 

He cannot breathe.

 

“Aka-chan.  Aka-chan.” Oikawa is crying.  Akaashi can hear it in his voice, and what is he _doing?_  What the hell is he _doing—_  “Please stop.  Please.”

 

Yamaguchi is clutching at his sweater, and he thinks it’s Kenma’s head shoved into his shoulder.  He cannot _breathe._

 

“You don’t get to say that about yourself,” Oikawa tells him.  “You don’t— I would have been _dead,_ Aka-chan.  Within the week.  If you hadn’t come around I would have been dead by the side of the road and no one would have missed me.  You know that? So you don’t get to just— I mean you gave everything up for us and that isn’t _fair._  If I get to flirt with the baker then you get to be in love with your bartender.  You get to be happy, Aka-chan, don’t you dare try to tell me you don’t deserve that.”

 

“Please, Keiji,” Kenma whispers.  “Please let yourself have this.”

 

And Akaashi doesn’t know what to say.  He doesn’t know how to tell them that he still sometimes goes out with Kuroo to take money that isn’t theirs to pay off debts they don’t owe.  He doesn’t know how to tell them that he first held a knife at seven years old, or that he still has to bury bodies for the swans. He doesn’t know how to tell them that at fourteen years old, he killed a man.

 

Yamaguchi has tears in his eyes and his whispered pleas come out shaky, and _if it’s just self-defense—_

 

“You’re ugly when you cry,” Akaashi tells Oikawa.

 

And Oikawa lets out a disbelieving laugh, shoves at Akaashi’s shoulder while telling him he’s so _rude,_ and that he’s not so pretty himself.

 

_If it’s just self-defense, does that make it okay?_

 

_Who grants forgiveness to a killer, anyway?_

 

They watch too many bad movies about ghosts.  Kenma burns the popcorn and Yamaguchi spends half the time with his face hidden in Akaashi’s shoulder, and Oikawa asks why he’s so scared if ghosts aren’t real, huh?

 

Kenma sleeps in Oikawa’s room.  Yamaguchi keeps his door open. Akaashi takes his time doing dishes and does not go to the bar.

 

It’s two in the morning and he puts Bokuto’s sweater in the laundry with the promise to himself that he’ll return it as soon as he cleans it, and steps into a shower that always runs too cold.

 

* * *

 

It’s like this:

 

Akaashi Keiji is always afraid for his boys.  He knows the gutters they have crawled out of and the scars that warp their skin, and knows the nightmares replaying again and again in their heads every night.  He is afraid for his boys, too fragile to rightly defend themselves from the horrors that crawl through the city streets. He is afraid for his boys because he has done terrible things and then brought them in as if that would make them any safer, and then continued to cause ruin.

 

He is plagued by the imagined images of their broken bodies stuck at the side of the road, forgotten about and impossible for him to reach and recover.  In his dreams, they die, every night, and Akaashi is never fast enough to save them. It always feels real. He always wakes up cold all over.

 

Akaashi worries about his boys because he has received all the threats before, knows that he has endlessly endangered them through his own sins.  He knows that if he allows himself too much of a distraction, he will be too late to save them.

 

It’s like—

 

He is very familiar with the feeling that something is _wrong._  So when he hears a slamming door, and Oikawa’s tired voice followed by Oikawa’s _shouting,_ he knows.

 

He feels the panic in his bones and feels the ghosts in his veins and switches the cold water off and barely grabs a towel before rushing out of the bathroom.  His breath is lodged in his throat and Kenma is clinging to Oikawa in front of Yamaguchi’s open door, and there are flowers on the floor.

 

It’s—

 

Akaashi’s eyes are locked onto the flowers resting gracefully in front of Yamaguchi’s door, joints freezing and feet cementing into the floor.  A crack runs through the center of his soul, spiderwebbing to reach every edge. He cannot stand this feeling. This damaged damaged broken feeling that has been static in his life for so long, that he can no longer bear.  And he can’t think of where the shift happened, when he finally could not take the weight, and what within him finally broke? What within him finally snapped what star finally burned out what constellation finally fractured what what whenwhathow why

 

The rot in his bones is beginning to eat him alive.

 

Yamaguchi is gone.


	10. kill all of this hurt you've been harboring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ripping with my sinners](https://youtu.be/doRUhDIB29s)  
>  cause fuck it man, i ain't no beginner  
> and then i crawled back to the life  
> that i said i wouldn't live in.

 

            He calls Sugawara. He can’t keep his hands from shaking and misdials the number three times, and by the time he actually gets him on the line, the panic in his veins has begun to strangle his voice, and he can barely get out the desperate message that he _needs_ him, _needs_ him, _please—_

 

            Sugawara does not ask questions. It’s not often that Akaashi calls on him; he knows something is wrong.

 

            He’s not the best person Akaashi knows, not the cleanest. He’s full of ghosts and fickle morals, but he’s— Akaashi can trust him with this. He doesn’t scare Kenma, and he and Oikawa have some sort of fucked up relationship that Akaashi doesn’t understand, but he knows it’ll be okay to leave them alone together for a little while. At the very least, Sugawara won’t let any more monsters into the den in Akaashi’s absence.

 

            Oikawa keeps a tight grip on Akaashi’s arm, fingertips digging in, but when Akaashi needs to leave, he doesn’t try to keep him from going. Only makes him promise to come back.

 

            Akaashi has never been one to provide false hope.

 

            There isn’t much access to anything so late into the night. No cabs, no trains. Akaashi only has himself and the tentative relationship he has with all the contacts in his phone. This should be enough. This should be okay. He’s survived far more for far longer with far less, after all, so this should be _fine,_ but when it comes down to it, Akaashi needs more. Akaashi needs whoever thought to touch Yamaguchi to know they’ve made a grave mistake.

 

            There’s a part of Akaashi that wants to call the swans and be done with it — let them burn the city to ash in retribution, no holds barred. They’d do it if he asked with no hesitation. They’re always looking for something to ruin. He could go to Kuroo, who’s always had a soft spot for Yamaguchi, who wouldn’t even need a reason to start taking names.

 

            Akaashi has options. And yet—

 

            Yamaguchi, months ago, had fallen into the habit of taking. Picking things off shelves at markets, plucking people’s wallets from their pockets. Seamless action with no thought behind it, no _reason._ Akaashi noticed this around the same time Oikawa got arrested for attempted arson, which he swore on his life wasn’t even an _attempt,_ that he was just fucking around, he didn’t _mean_ for the grocer’s to catch flame. Akaashi had sat all three of his boys down and told them it was time to stop. That this wasn’t the way to be. That sure, everyone had always taken and taken and taken from them with zero consequences, but that didn’t mean they had to pay it forward.

 

            Akaashi did not want them to tumble down his same path. He did not want his same phantoms to wrap themselves around their throats, too, choking them awake in the middle of the night to tell them it was time to repent. So he cut it off before they had the chance to spiral.

 

            He promised them to do the same.

 

            (Of course, he did not tell them about the jobs he assisted the snakes with, the late calls from Kuroo. They wouldn’t have understood that it was for them. To keep them safe when they got bored and had nothing left to do with themselves but fall back into criminal habits.)

 

            He made them promise to be good. As good as they could be, anyway.

 

            Akaashi does not call Kuroo, or the swans, or any of the other numbers he has regrettably saved for future reference. There’s always another option. This is what he promised all his boys, and this is how he has promised to maintain his own proceedings.

 

            Bokuto has insomnia. He has a cat that is for all intents and purposes not really much of a cat at all, and he has insomnia, and if Akaashi were to come to his door even now, in the middle of the night, he would answer. Akaashi could knock and Bokuto would be there and so he does. He finds himself outside Bokuto’s shitty door that’s _far_ too easy to break in through just past three in the morning, with trembling hands and the breath missing from his lungs.

 

            He can hear Bokuto moving around inside, presumably playing with Cumin, or trying to make one of those awful-sounding recipes he always rambles about, and when Akaashi knocks, it goes silent. He knocks again, because while Akaashi is a very patient man, he is also a very desperate man, and he needs Bokuto, he needs _help,_ he _needs—_

 

            He hears shuffling, Bokuto walking to the door, and then a pause. When the door swings open, Bokuto looks surprised to see him.

 

            “Akaashi! Are you okay? What’s wrong?” His hands dart out but never land, never fall onto Akaashi’s skin. They remain hovering above his bare arms, which he’s wrapped around himself as if that will keep all his pieces in place. As if _anything_ could keep all his pieces—

 

            He wishes Bokuto would just touch him. He knows it’d do the opposite of comforting him, but that’s the point, isn’t it? A person can only break so many times, and Akaashi thinks that if anyone was going to ruin him, he’d want for it to be Bokuto.

 

            “They took— Bokuto. I can’t— _Tadashi.”_ His voice breaks on Yamaguchi’s name. He can’t breathe. There’s no air for his lungs, nothing to help him get the words out of his mouth. He can’t breathe, he can’t, he _can’t,_ and he knows he’s seeing the dark shapes of Bokuto’s front room, the doorway, _Bokuto,_ but nothing is registering and for all that matters he may as well be seeing nothing and he _can’t_

 

            Tadashi. They’re going to kill Tadashi.

 

            And it’s all Akaashi’s fault.

 

* * *

 

 

            Dahlias are a familiar insignia. Akaashi has had the image of them imprinted in his mind since he was fourteen, and watched the one marked on his father’s neck run red. The meaning behind a bouquet of them outside Yamaguchi’s door is not so difficult to pick up on.

 

            Akaashi always knew he’d be found, eventually. These things were only a matter of time, and lifespans always ran shorter in the family circle, anyway. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to make it as long as he could.

 

            He took little with him when he left. Barely any clothes, only a small pocket of cash, a dinky plastic lighter. He lived on couches and walked every place he could, kept his name as far off the radar as was possible. Whatever it took to avoid getting caught so soon.

 

            And this was fine. This was enough. He could get by on meager meals and clothes worn through to ruins, could manage the thin-cushioned couches and freezing nights spent traversing between alleyways for a place to stay when no one else offered one. At least he was alive. At least he knew he would get to stay alive for then.

 

            Things slowly built up. He worked jobs for the people he stayed with, their friends, their crews. Did extra favors on the side, and then more to keep his record clean and his name out of circulation when he inevitably got caught. Akaashi pocketed money, added contacts to his ever-growing list, and enemies to an even longer one. He rented his first apartment and then his second, spent and spent and spent on protection, on tools, on methods to keep himself safe. To keep his boys safe.

 

            It was fine.

 

            He was fine.

 

            He had lived far longer than he’d ever expected, and kept his boys alive longer than they’d ever hoped, and—

 

            And he’d gotten comfortable. Had put a little too much trust in locks that could always be faulty when put up against the right tools, had put a little too much faith in his own careful methods.

 

            Akaashi had laid a little too much hope in his boys.

 

            They held life to different standards. Had different expectations in people. They didn’t have ghosts wrapped tight around their necks in a constant reminder to not even _think about it,_ didn’t have demons following in their footsteps just _waiting_ for them to screw up. They didn’t fall down Akaashi’s same path.

 

            He should’ve known. And instead, gunpowder veins ignited, and he is going to burn.

 

            They are all going to burn.

 

* * *

 

             Bokuto, true to his standard fashion, ignores all the obvious things that he is capable of. He does not stare at the warped markings down Akaashi’s bare arms, or comment on his hands that still violently shake. He does not touch him. But it’s inevitable he’s going to ask—

 

            “What’s going on, Akaashi?”

 

            And Akaashi doesn’t want to say. Doesn’t want to ruin the one person in his life who has never been a part of any of this. Bokuto gets to go home at night without worrying about whether he needs to replace all his window locks again, and doesn’t sleep with a knife under his pillow. His stories are all full of wonder at the world, and every smile stretches across his whole face. He does not have phantoms creeping behind in his shadows.

 

            Akaashi does not want to ruin that.

 

            But he knows he has to tell him.

 

            He’s not afraid of judgement; he knows Bokuto is perfectly aware of the type of world Akaashi lives in, the types of things he’s surely capable of. This particular corner of the city, it’s hard to find someone who is innocent. Akaashi thinks Bokuto might be the only one who is, when it comes down to it. So he tells him that his boys have made a mistake, have unknowingly gone up against the wrong group of people, and that Akaashi thought it would be fine. Thought if the small handful of people they’d gotten involved with were taken care of, the problem would go away, or would at least be put on long enough of a hold for them to find a different place to hide.

 

            Akaashi was wrong, and now he’s paying the price, and he can’t lose Yamaguchi. He can’t lose his boys.

 

            He wants Bokuto to tell him it’ll be okay. To talk about stars exploding into beautiful supernovas, to remind him again and again and again that there’s no way to burn so bright without first earning the scars. He wants the Bokuto who offers quiet smiles and promises that he’ll survive it. Bokuto’s not smiling.

 

            “Akaash,’” Bokuto says. His voice ghosts over Akaashi, low and quiet and raising his skin. “Sometimes it’s . . . y’know, Washio’s all into philosophy? And, like, morals aren’t black and white. There’s all this grey in the middle. It’s not always just right or wrong, it’s— what’s the word? Sometimes it’s justified to do things you probably shouldn’t.” He meets Akaashi’s eyes. He wipes the tears from his cheeks with a feather-light touch. “Sometimes it’s okay.”

 

            Akaashi takes a breath, nods. His hands shake. The swans always answer on the first ring. Kuroo has always told Akaashi that if anything ever happened to any of his boys he’d be there to start the war with him.

 

            “Okay, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi says. “Okay.”

 

            There are ghosts in Akaashi’s kitchen cupboard. Little hauntings from past lives, phantoms of terrible deeds, the lingering breaths of sins that still hang over his head. These little things that sometimes whisper out, creeping towards him in the middle of the night, trying to sink back beneath his skin. Malevolent calls when he least wants them, trying to remind him that they are there, he _put_ them there, and they are not going away.

 

            There are ghosts in Akaashi’s kitchen cupboard. He is done trying to keep them at bay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! hello! been a while! sorry about that i uhh. was on vacation. and then got hit with a bunch of assignments that i think i'm finally getting a break from. but i'm back! how're you!
> 
> (also sorry if like. some details don't lineup w the rest of the fic. it's Been a While and i definitely didn't reread to fact check. so. anygay. hope y'all've been swell!! hmu on [twitter](https://twitter.com/protostxr) if you'd like!)


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